As Israeli voters prepare for elections on Oct. 27, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to defend and distance himself from one of his government’s most controversial policies: allowing Qatar to funnel nearly $2 billion into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for more than a decade. Previously undisclosed documents obtained by TIME, including letters from senior Israeli security officials to Qatari leaders, reveal that Israel encouraged and played a direct role in a payment program that was more extensive than Netanyahu has publicly acknowledged. Beginning in 2012, Netanyahu’s government helped to facilitate Qatari payments to Gaza that had begun after Hamas seized control in 2007.
By 2018, Qatar had sent roughly $1.1 billion into the Strip, according to an analysis provided to Israeli ministers, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported, with the funding designated for humanitarian assistance, fuel, and government salaries. That year, after Israeli officials castigated Qatar for allegedly financing Hamas, the Qataris began demanding formal documentation of an arrangement the two governments had agreed was meant to provide relief to citizens of the beleaguered enclave. The extent of Israel’s cooperation with the payments was reflected in a 2020 letter from Yossi Cohen, then director of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, to Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
The flow of money from Qatar into Gaza has taken on new significance since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed southern Israel, murdered some 1,200 people, and took 251 more hostage. The worst security failure in the country’s history raised troubling questions about whether the financial lifeline helped to sustain Hamas’s grip on power and, in turn, enabled it to carry out the assault. Since then, Qatar has been frustrated by allegations leveled by Israeli political leaders that its payments to Gaza had helped finance the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Under previous aid mechanisms, all financial assistance, as well as goods such as food, medicine and fuel, passed through Israel before entering Gaza,” a spokesperson for Qatar’s International Media Office tells TIME. If any funding reached Hamas, as alleged by individuals and groups with political agendas against Qatar, the responsibility lies with Israel, which oversaw the delivery and created the mechanism.” Critics have long argued that Netanyahu sought to sustain Hamas rule in Gaza to keep the Palestinians divided between the Islamist terror group and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, foreclosing the prospect of a unified Palestinian leadership capable of negotiating a two-state solution. Netanyahu’s wager, according to these critics, was that the aid would give Hamas something to lose and would therefore help contain the group while Israel pursued normalization with the Arab world without resolving the Palestinian question.
Instead, as Israel moved closer to a historic agreement with Saudi Arabia, Hamas launched an assault that upended the region, plunging it into war. The Prime Minister’s office declined to comment for this story. The documents now give Israelis a fuller accounting of a policy that preceded the catastrophe, as they prepare to render a verdict on the man who presided over both.
He was the one who championed and accelerated the program, his government was in charge of the way it was run, and now we know as a society that we can never afford to make a mistake like that again.” Ehud Olmert was still prime minister when Qatar began sending money to Gaza in 2007, after Hamas won control of the coastal enclave. At the outset, the Israeli government was not directly involved in the transfers. That changed under Netanyahu.
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