September 10, 2014 | Quote
House Panel Urged to Probe Turkish, Qatari Support of Hamas
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The Foundation for the Defense of Democracy’s Vice President for Research Jonathan Schanzer warned in testimony submitted to the hearing that after relations between Hamas and Iran cooled off due to fallout from the Syrian civil war, “Qatar appears to have filled much of the void left by Iran.”
While Schanzer discussed Qatar’s political support for Hamas, he also cited an unnamed “Arab diplomat” as saying that “Qatar finances Hamas strongly.”
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Schanzer said that Congress should call for Government Accounting Office investigations and intelligence assessments of both Qatar and Turkey, and suggested that “dedicated hearings on each country may also be useful.”
“Both Turkey and Qatar serve as US allies while simultaneously qualifying as state sponsors of terrorism, to the letter of US law,” Schanzer warned. “The problems do not end with Hamas. Both countries have been involved in a plethora of illicit financial activity with a wide array of terrorist groups and rogue states. To be clear, the goal is to change the behavior of both countries and to preserve these alliances, if at all possible.”
In his testimony, Schanzer mentioned concerns that funds directed toward humanitarian ends in Gaza had gone instead to the Hamas leadership.
“According to an Egyptian publication, Muslim Brotherhood groups sent several million dollars to Gaza to help assist civilians to build their houses destroyed in the recent war on the Strip,” he explained. “According to the report, a financial officer from Hamas named Essam al-Da’alis did not distribute the funds to civilians to build their homes, but rather dispersed the funds to prominent members of the militant group.”
Schanzer suggested that funding has not simply been channeled to Hamas’s terror operations, but to the personal coffers of the group’s leadership.
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