Will continue payments to Gaza, says Qatar’s Foreign Minister

Doha, Dec 12: Qatar’s Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulaziz Al-Khulaifi said Qatar will continue its payments to Gaza to support the enclave, as it has been doing for years. “We’re not going to change our mandate. 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,” Abdulaziz Al-Khulaifi added.
Qatari Foreign Minister’s remarks come against increased anger in Israel about years of payments from the Gulf state to Hamas. Under a deal, Qatari diplomats used to arrive in the enclave every month with suitcases containing $15 million in cash.
The cash deliveries were supposed to help pay Gaza’s civil servants. Pictures in 2018 showed workers lining up to receive $100 bills, CNN reported.
Israel had approved the deal in a security cabinet meeting in August 2018, during a previous Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure as Prime Minister. At that time, Netanyahu was criticised for being soft on Hamas. After Qatar’s envoy to Gaza, Mohamed Al Emadi, delivered the first suitcases of cash in November 2018, Netanyahu defended the initiative.
“I’m doing everything I can in coordination with security experts to return calm to (Israeli) villages of the south, but also to prevent a humanitarian disaster (in Gaza). It’s a process. I think at this time, this is the right step,” Netanyahu had said.
The then Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who was among his worst critics, called the funds “protection money”. Bennett later became Prime Minister himself in a short-lived government. On Sunday, he told CNN that he had stopped allowing the payments to be made in cash when he became the Prime Minister, calling the cash suitcases a “horrendous mistake”. “Why would we feed them (Hamas) cash to kill us (Israelis)?” Bennett asked. (IANS)