Lawyer: Palestinian Denies Funneling Charity Money to Hamas
Image by World Vision International
A Palestinian representative of U.S.-based Christian charity World Vision denies Israeli allegations that he funneled millions of dollars in aid money to the Islamist militant group Hamas, his lawyer said on Sunday.
Mohammad El Halabi, World Vision’s manager of operations in the Gaza Strip, was arrested by Israel on June 15 while crossing into the enclave, which is under the de facto rule of Hamas, a group on the Israeli and U.S. terrorism blacklists.
Briefing reporters on Thursday, a senior Israeli security official said Halabi, who has run the group’s Gaza operations since 2010, had been under surveillance.
The Israeli official said Halabi confessed to siphoning off some $7.2 million a year, about 60 percent of World Vision’s Gaza funding, to pay Hamas fighters, buy arms, pay for other activities and build fortifications.
“Mohammad (El Halabi) denies all these accusations. He denied it all,” Jerusalem-based lawyer Mohammad Mahmoud, who was assigned to represent El Halabi by the charity group, told Reuters by phone on Sunday.
Mahmoud said he met his client during a court session last week, and these were his first comments made publicly.
World Vision had already said it was “shocked” by Israel’s allegations, and while it had no reason to believe them to be true, it would review the evidence.
Hamas has denied any connection to Halabi.
After the case was made public, Australia suspended aid to World Vision. The U.S. State Department, according to one official, is concerned by the allegations and following the investigation closely.
On Sunday, dozens of Palestinians who used to benefit from World Vision aid in Gaza rallied in solidarity with Halabi, demanding his release.—Reuters
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
