Qatar will maintain its cash flow and financial support to the Gaza Strip, as it has done for years, the oil-rich Gulf state's top diplomat said on Monday.
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In an interview with CNN, Qatari Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Mohammed bin Abdulaziz Al-Khulaifi said, "Our mandate is our continuous help and support for our brothers and sisters of Palestine. We will continue to do it systematically as we did it before,” Al-Khulaifi said.
Al-Khulaifi's remarks come against the backdrop of Israel's expressed frustration with its facilitation of monthly cash transfers in the tens of millions from Doha to bankroll Hamas' rule in Gaza.
According to the report, Qatar began making monthly payments to the Gaza Strip in 2018. Some $15 million were sent into Gaza in cash-filled suitcases – delivered by the Qataris through Israeli territory after months of negotiation with Israel.
The CNN report highlighted that in 2018, Naftali Bennett, then-education minister and later prime minister, opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to permit Qatari money transfers.
Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Bennett said that during his brief stint as prime minister, he "stopped the cash suitcases" which he described as a "horrendous mistake." "Why would we feed them cash to kill us?” Bennett questioned.
Speaking to Politico late last month, Netanyahu strongly rejected claims that he had, for years, facilitated the financing and empowerment of Hamas as a strategy to create a "divide and conquer" situation between the Hamas government in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, labeling these allegations as "ridiculous."
Netanyahu claimed instead that Israeli governments under his leadership "wanted to avoid a civilian humanitarian collapse — disease, rampant hunger and other things that would have created an impossible humanitarian situation." According to him, "We didn’t want to strengthen Hamas at all. We wanted to weaken it and degrade its capabilities as far as we could."