Hamas leaders live in posh Qatar, hundreds of kilometres from the war zone, where they run a lucrative terrorist enterprise and have personally accumulated billions exploiting the impoverished people of Gaza. Their business model is simple: Hamas has collected for years a 20 percent tax on everything smuggled through Gaza’s tunnels, such as weaponry and ammunition; it levies taxes on Gaza residents and businesses without providing decent education or health services, and it receives unknown amounts from Iran, and likely Russia. Hamas also skims donations made by Qatar via the United Nations which are earmarked to buy fuel, pay government salaries, and support the needy. As a result of these profits, its military budget is estimated at $350 million annually. In essence, Hamas is a militarized Mafia, as is Putin’s regime, and has simply followed in the footsteps of the Godfather of the Palestinian Cause, the late Yasser Arafat, who hid billions of dollars worth of real estate and investments around the world. Hamas leaders are kleptocrats, not saviours, and make money waging war, exploiting people, and destabilizing the world.
Like Arafat and Putin, Hamas leaders deliver misery, death, and poverty to their own people. The unemployment rate in Gaza is 47 percent and more than 80 percent of its population live in poverty. Hamas won election in 2007 in the Gaza Strip and immediately began building a tunnel system and creating an army equipped with thousands of soldiers, drones, rockets, and weapons. It also runs extortion and smuggling schemes and dips into the huge sums of financial aid from Qatar (encouraged and approved by Israel) but not audited. “A senior official with the PA [Palestinian Authority which governs 39 percent of the West Bank and Israelis the rest] alleged that the tunnel-smuggling market had transformed 1,700 senior Hamas officials into millionaires, according to a report in Saudi weekly Al-Majalla,” reported The Times of Israel.
Ironically, Arafat was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1994 with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East. But in 2004, the world discovered that Arafat had diverted at least $1 billion in PA public funds (out of $5.5 billion sent to Palestinians by the European Union) to himself for personal use. The current PA leader in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, has also been cited for money laundering in the Panama Papers, according to the Jewish Journal in 2019. He’s also been accused of nepotism, ongoing corruption, and ineptitude in stopping the seizure of land by radical Israeli settlers who openly flout laws. But at least the PA stages regular elections and unemployment and poverty rates in the West Bank are half those in Gaza.
Hamas is another story. It took over Gaza’s government in 2007 after winning a mandate to stop corruption and pursue a two-state solution, not for its avowed rejection of Israel’s right to exist. It is illegitimate and has suspended elections ever since. In 2023, a poll showed that 73 percent of Gazans believed Hamas was corrupt, but saw little hope for change. In July, a Washington Institute poll found that 64 percent of Gazans wanted improved health care, employment, education and some sense of normalcy instead of Hamas’ claimed “resistance” against the State of Israel. Instead, they got war.
The Hamas Mafia is headed by three men who make financial decisions, pick terrorist targets, and run public relations campaigns. Khaled Mashal is the leader and worth an estimated $4 billion. He is also close to Russia and a zealot. In a chilling interview on an Arab television channel MEMRI published by The Jerusalem Post, he boasted that the October 7 attack was a successful template that should be adopted worldwide by terrorist communities. “We want the Arab communities in the West to be active and cooperate with superpowers like China and Russia,” he said. “For your information, Russia has benefited from our attack, because we distracted the US from them and from Ukraine. China saw our attack as a dazzling example. The Russians told us that what happened on October 7 would be taught in military academies. The Chinese are thinking of carrying out a plan in Taiwan. The Arabs are giving the world a master class.”
Ismail Haniyeh is also worth $4 billion and is the senior political leader of Hamas and Chair of its Political Bureau. He shuttles back and forth to Iran and Russia. He lives in Qatar and rose to prominence in 2006 as Hamas’ prime minister and its chief “theologist”. “We confront the occupation and ruin its [the West’s] plans despite the great pain and the growing number of martyrs, wounded individuals and Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes, which has pained us and has affected all of our families. This is the price of freedom and liberation,” he said in a press conference on November 25 in Egypt.
The third leader is Mousa Abu Marzook, worth $3 billion and Deputy Chair of the Hamas Political Bureau. He grew up in a refugee camp, became an engineer and worked for 14 years in the United States. He returned to raise funds for Hamas from donors in Europe and America and to formulate its international messaging. Marzook lately reaches out to media in the Global South and recently told The Hindu that “the root of the problem is the occupation. All we want is freedom because we do not accept to live under occupation. Just as the Indian people rejected the British occupation and expelled it in the end.” He was also part of the Hamas delegation that met with Putin in Moscow two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre — a meeting that marked Putin’s total abandonment of his long-standing alliance with Israel and his total alignment with Iran and Middle East terrorist groups.
Iranian officials also came to Moscow with Hamas and Tehran now regards Russia as a major power broker in the region. Putin’s mercenaries, the Wagner Group, have been stationed in Syria since 2015 and are heavily involved with Iranian terrorist proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon. “It’s clear that Hamas did not just get lucky with this [Oct. 7] attack. It has been training for it for years, including in Iran and unsubstantiated reports that Hamas received training by Russian forces,” according to Memri, the Middle East Research Institute. “Other reports suggest that some of the weapons used by Hamas on October 7 came from Russia, and still other reports are that Russia is providing Hamas with Western weapons captured in Ukraine.”
Both the Israel-Gaza war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have been perpetrated by rotten kleptocracies that spout phoney ideologies, exploit their own people, and generate billions to wage war. Military solutions are necessary, but the civilized world must impose draconian financial restrictions and penalties globally to choke these regimes. Their enablers must also be punished, from Qatar that hosts Hamas leaders to Swiss banks or hedge funds in New York, London, and the Cayman Islands that hide and invest money on behalf of terrorists, oligarchs, and kleptocrats. If not, the world — and not just Ukrainians and Israelis — will continue to be held hostage by the most ruthless among us.
Quite right ! Excellent !
The "follow the money" suggestion is surely the most viable solution. Since so much is known about patrimony of the bad actors, does it make sense to incentivize cyber sleuths and whistleblowers to find the money by offering them huge rewards based on a percentage of whatever is recovered ? It seems to me that cyber sleuths and whistleblowers are better at this than most law enforcement agencies.
Regarding the "template" comments, they are obviously well founded. How can the world deal with such a threat ? Must there be enhanced security and surveillance to thwart future 9/11 and 10/7 attacks ? And how should democracies deal with perpetrators be they individuals, organizations or states ? Are the current legal approaches still valid in when dealing with such threats ? We already live in a Kafkaesque and 1984 world, must we tolerate more controls over our daily lives to enable us to live in peace and thwart bad actors ? Since sanctions and limited military strikes are not severely hurting the bad actors nor thwarting their nefarious conduct what will work ? Over to your readers !
There can be little doubt of the validity of the charges against Hamas and its leaders as set out in this piece. One is left, therefore, to wonder why the government of Israel has found it valuable to continue to fund Hamas, proudly justifying this support as being of benefit to the state of Israel. One also wonders why the people of Gaza, and their housing and social infrastructure have been so aggressively targeted by the Israeli war machine, when, clearly, it is the leadership, living like kings in countries well within reach of Israeli arms or covert operations, who are the problem, or so we are led to believe. There is much going on here which is, apparently, beyond investigation or discussion. That is truly a shame.