You might have heard that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been propping up Hamas in Gaza… but is there more to the story?

Some argue that Netanyahu has an ‘alliance’ or at least an interdependency with Hamas to serve his own goals, but is that really true?

In the first two parts of this series, we explored whether Israel helped create Hamas and whether they’ve used Hamas to derail the Oslo Peace process. Now, we’re diving into a different question: Has Netanyahu been using Qatari aid money to support Hamas, aiming to block any actual resolution to the conflict?

So, let’s start with a 2019 quote attributed to Netanyahu from a private Likud Party meeting:

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.’”

While Netanyahu has denied saying this, let’s assume that he did.

What he was referring to was the continued implementation of a decision first made in August 2018, when Israel’s security cabinet approved the transfer of cash to Hamas from Qatar, to be delivered in actual suitcases.

Why, you may ask? To understand this better, we have to go back a little further.

In 2017, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of pro-U.S. Arab states imposed a siege on Qatar, accusing it of backing ‘extremism’ and demanding Doha end its financial support for Hamas. This cutback strained Hamas financially but ultimately backfired—it pushed Hamas even closer to Iran, their other key ally.

That same year, Hamas released a new charter that accepted a two-state solution and rejected anti-Semitism. They even signed a deal with the Palestinian Authority to take over civilian control of Gaza. However, Israeli and U.S. pressure on the PA killed that deal just before it took effect.

In a devastating blow to Gaza’s already battered economy, the Palestinian Authority stopped paying salaries to its employees in Gaza in late 2017.

On March 30, 2018, Hamas endorsed the Great Return March protests, where thousands of Gazans demonstrated peacefully along the separation fence. Israel’s response? Its forces shot and killed hundreds of unarmed demonstrators and injured tens of thousands.

With Hamas shifting tactics, forming closer ties with Iran, and finding Israel unresponsive to nonviolent action, Israel approved the Qatari aid to ease tensions, a move not intended to create an ‘alliance’ but to prevent an armed conflict from boiling over.

Netanyahu defended the move, arguing that it was aimed at ‘returning calm to the villages of the south.’ This Qatari aid continued even after Netanyahu was out of office under Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in 2021 and 2022. Benny Gantz, now a prominent Netanyahu opponent, was the Defense Minister while Qatari aid reached Gaza.

The other aspect of this argument of a Hamas-Netanyahu alliance is that Netanyahu had deliberately pitted the West Bank against Gaza. Yet, this split began in 2006 when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, during the reign of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who also decided to withdraw from Gaza and place it under siege in 2005.

The idea that Netanyahu suddenly ‘propped up’ Hamas also overlooks earlier Israeli policies aimed at deepening divisions between Palestinian factions. Back in 2007, a Palestinian civil war erupted between Hamas and Fatah. At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Labour Party government supported a covert coup plot that was financed and armed by the Bush administration for Fatah to overthrow Hamas in Gaza. When Hamas uncovered this conspiracy and defeated the coup attempt, they took complete control of Gaza, ousting the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.

Following this, Israel made repeated efforts to prevent any reunification between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. Israel tightened its blockade on Gaza, and in 2008-2009, Olmert’s government launched the first major military assault on the territory, enforcing a policy of division between Gaza and the West Bank. Qatar, meanwhile, was continuing to back Hamas.

Around this time, a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from March 2008 revealed an Israeli strategy to keep Gaza ‘on the brink of collapse.’ The goal, according to the cable, was to starve Gazan civilians so severely that they would turn against Hamas, and this was again when Netanyahu was out of the picture.

So, what does this all mean? Well, it’s undeniable that Netanyahu has worked to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, directly undermining efforts at Palestinian unity in both 2014 and 2017. But it’s an enormous stretch to say he’s ‘propped up’ Hamas.

Ultimately, the idea of a Netanyahu-Hamas dependency rests on two assumptions: First, that Netanyahu alone is responsible for Palestinian oppression, ignoring Israel’s broader role. Second, Hamas operates based on the West’s orientalist depiction of the group, that it is a collection of Muslim stereotypes, which explains its motivations as being driven by an “ancient desire to kill Jews,” as U.S. President Joe Biden claims.

These assumptions allow for a pro-Israel argument that scapegoats Netanyahu for all Israeli crimes while robbing Hamas of all historical context and seeking instead to argue that its members are driven by a genetic disposition that compels terrorism against Jewish people, also assuming their intellectual inferiority in how easily they can be duped into an alliance with their enemy.

Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike in 1988, once said:

The best solution is to let all—Christians, Jews, and Muslims—live in Palestine, in an Islamic state.’

This statement contradicts many of the notions set forth in the movement’s original charter, often quoted as if it represents the group today.

Despite many disagreeing with Hamas and its tactics, it is seen today by the vast majority of Palestinians as a resistance movement against occupation. Among the plethora of Palestinian armed movements, from Secular and Marxist to Islamic, which all engage in similar tactics against Israel, it was Hamas that emerged from history as the most powerful.

While Israel has indeed weaponized Palestinian disunity to serve its interests, its measures were focused on weakening armed resistance rather than supporting any group outright. And claims that Israel ‘created’ Hamas or that Netanyahu ‘propped them up’ don’t align with the facts.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47

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