Hamas Official Admits Funding Temple Mount Riots
Image by Getty Images
A senior Hamas operative said that the group is paying young Arabs to harass Jews at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Israel’s domestic security service announced.
Hamas operative Mahmoud Toameh, 63, made the claim in interrogations by the Shin Bet security services after his arrest on May 14, Shin Bet wrote in a statement posted Thursday on its website.
Shin Bet’s account of Toameh’s interrogations quotes him as saying that Hamas cooperates with Israel’s Islamic Movement to prevent Jews from entering the Temple Mount compound. Hamas pays a group of young men a monthly salary of $1,150-$1,440 to harass and throw stones at Jewish visitors.
Toameh, who was born in the West Bank city of Tulkarem but now lives in Saudi Arabia, was arrested at the Allenby Crossing between Israel and Jordan and was indicted on Thursday at a military court, Shin Bet wrote. The Shin Bet announcement did not specify the counts with which Toameh was charged.
He said Hamas had recently seen a decrease in the level of funding offered to the group by Iran and has come to rely more heavily on funding from donors in the Persian Gulf.
According to Toameh, the “Palestinian Business Forum” is a Hamas front.
Shin Bet said Toameh, who has eight children, has presided since 2008 on Hamas’ Shura Council, which is headed by Khaled Mashaal. He also sits on Hamas’ main economic council.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
