The Short Answer
Yes. In the normal political meaning of the word “fund,” Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments helped fund Hamas by approving, facilitating, and defending a system through which large amounts of Qatari money entered Hamas-controlled Gaza.
The money itself largely came from Qatar rather than the Israeli treasury. But Israel was not a passive observer. Under Netanyahu, the Israeli government approved the transfers, allowed cash to cross Israeli-controlled territory into Gaza, participated in the mechanism used to distribute it, and continued the policy despite objections from Israeli officials who warned that it strengthened Hamas.
There is also significant evidence that the policy was not simply humanitarian. In 2019, Netanyahu was reported to have defended the transfers to members of his Likud party on the grounds that maintaining the separation between Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank made the creation of a Palestinian state more difficult.
That makes the most accurate answer considerably stronger than “Israel merely allowed humanitarian aid into Gaza.”
Netanyahu pursued a policy that financially sustained Hamas’s government, helped preserve Hamas as a rival to the Palestinian Authority, and ultimately strengthened the political structure he publicly claimed Israel needed to defeat.
The extent to which Netanyahu knew that specific Qatari funds were being diverted directly to Hamas’s military wing is more disputed. But the broader funding policy itself is not seriously in doubt.
How Netanyahu’s Government Helped Finance Hamas-Controlled Gaza
Hamas has governed the Gaza Strip since taking control of the territory in 2007. Qatar subsequently became one of Gaza’s largest financial supporters.
The crucial issue is Israel’s role.
TIME’s 2024 fact-check of Netanyahu’s own account found that Israel became directly involved in facilitating Qatari financial transfers during Netanyahu’s premiership. According to TIME, Qatar sent roughly $1.1 billion into Gaza between 2012 and 2018, including funding for fuel, government salaries, and humanitarian assistance. Netanyahu’s government approved Israel’s participation in the transfers.
The arrangement became especially visible in 2018.
That year, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had reduced salary payments to Gaza as part of his struggle with Hamas. Netanyahu’s government supported an alternative arrangement under which Qatar would supply money directly to Gaza.
In November 2018, a $15 million Qatari cash shipment entered Gaza with Israeli approval. Reuters reported that it was the first installment of a planned $90 million over six months. The money included salaries for tens of thousands of civil servants employed by the Hamas-run administration.
This was not money somehow slipping through Israeli controls.
Israel approved the mechanism.
CNN and the Israeli investigative organization Shomrim later reported that Israel’s security cabinet had approved the arrangement in August 2018, while Netanyahu was prime minister. Qatari officials then physically brought millions of dollars in cash through Israeli territory and into Gaza.
That is why describing Netanyahu as having “funded Hamas” is substantively reasonable even though Qatar supplied the cash.
Governments routinely fund organizations and political systems through grants, intermediaries, foreign partners, subsidies, authorized transfers, and financial arrangements. The relevant question is not whose bank account originally contained the money. It is whether Netanyahu’s government knowingly enabled money to reach and sustain Hamas-controlled Gaza.
It did.
Netanyahu Was Warned That the Policy Strengthened Hamas
The policy was controversial inside Israel well before October 7, 2023.
Avigdor Liberman, Netanyahu’s defense minister, resigned in November 2018 amid disagreements over Gaza policy. Naftali Bennett, another senior right-wing Israeli politician who later became prime minister, also objected to the cash transfers.
Former senior Israeli defense and intelligence official Amos Gilad later described the Qatari money as effectively giving Hamas “oxygen.” CNN reported his assessment that Qatar was providing roughly $30 million per month and that the money allowed Hamas to maintain its control of Gaza while simultaneously developing its military capabilities.
The economic logic is straightforward.
Money used to pay government employees, purchase fuel, maintain public services, or support poor families does not have to be handed directly to a military commander to benefit the organization governing the territory.
Money is fungible.
If an outside government pays expenses that the Hamas-run administration would otherwise have to pay itself, Hamas can use its other revenue for different purposes.
TIME made precisely this point in its fact-check of Netanyahu, citing former CIA analyst Chip Usher’s explanation that spending covered by outside funding freed Hamas’s own resources for other activities.
So the distinction between “money for Hamas” and “money for the government Hamas controlled” is much less meaningful economically than it may initially sound.
Netanyahu Reportedly Saw Hamas as a Way to Keep Palestinians Divided
This is perhaps the most politically important part of the story.
The funding policy was not happening in a vacuum. Hamas controlled Gaza while its rival, the Palestinian Authority dominated by Fatah, controlled parts of the occupied West Bank.
A unified Palestinian political leadership could potentially negotiate internationally for Palestinian statehood.
A divided Palestinian leadership made that considerably harder.
In March 2019, The Jerusalem Post reported on a Likud faction meeting in which Netanyahu defended allowing Qatari money into Gaza.
According to a source present at the meeting, Netanyahu argued that people who opposed the creation of a Palestinian state should support sending money to Gaza because maintaining the separation between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank helped prevent Palestinian statehood.
The reported statement is important enough to quote briefly:
“Whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring the funds.
The wording comes from a journalist’s account based on a source at the meeting rather than a publicly available recording, so the quotation should be treated as reported rather than independently recorded.
But the broader strategy is supported by more than that single account.
CNN’s investigation found Israeli officials describing a belief that strengthening Hamas relative to the Palestinian Authority would weaken unified Palestinian political authority. Former Israeli national security official Shlomo Brom similarly described Palestinian division as useful to Netanyahu because it allowed him to argue that Israel had no unified Palestinian negotiating partner.
TIME also reported that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak characterized Netanyahu’s approach as treating Hamas as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, while Netanyahu denied that interpretation.
Seen from the Palestinian side, the consequence is significant.
Israeli policy was not merely responding to an unavoidable division between Palestinians. There is substantial evidence that Netanyahu’s government considered that division strategically useful and pursued policies that helped preserve it.
That does not mean Israel created every conflict between Hamas and Fatah. It does mean the Israeli government had incentives to maintain a political environment in which no unified Palestinian leadership could negotiate on behalf of both Gaza and the West Bank.
Did Netanyahu Know the Money Was Reaching Hamas’s Military Wing?
This is where the evidence becomes more contested.
In March 2025, Israeli media reported that former Shin Bet director Nadav Argaman had warned Netanyahu in 2019 that money entering Gaza from Qatar was being diverted to Hamas’s military wing.
According to reports cited by The Times of Israel, Israeli Military Intelligence provided another warning in 2020, assessing that Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif was siphoning approximately $4 million per month from the Qatari funds.
Channel 12 reportedly cited three Israeli security sources confirming that the warnings existed.
Netanyahu’s office denied receiving an intelligence document establishing that the Qatari money was being diverted to terrorism and argued that security agencies had consistently represented the payments as money for fuel, needy families, and civilian salaries.
Those competing claims should not be collapsed into certainty.
It is verified that Netanyahu approved and continued the Qatari funding mechanism. It is strongly reported, but disputed by Netanyahu’s office, that he was specifically warned that millions were being diverted to Hamas’s military wing.
The latter should therefore be presented as a serious allegation supported by Israeli security sources, not as an uncontested fact.
Netanyahu Says the Money Was Humanitarian
Netanyahu has strongly rejected the accusation that he intentionally bankrolled Hamas.
In a 2024 interview with TIME, he argued that the payments were intended to prevent Gaza’s civilian infrastructure from collapsing. He cited sewage treatment, water supplies, education, disease prevention, and other basic services as reasons Israel permitted the money to enter.
There is evidence supporting the fact that humanitarian considerations were part of the policy.
The 2018 Reuters reporting described the Qatari money as paying civilian salaries and helping impoverished Gaza residents. Israeli officials at the time said the funds were not supposed to finance Hamas military activities.
But that does not resolve the larger question.
A policy can have a humanitarian component and simultaneously strengthen the government receiving the benefit.
Netanyahu’s defense therefore explains one stated purpose of the funding mechanism. It does not erase its political or financial consequences.
And it does not explain away the contemporaneous reporting that Netanyahu regarded the continued split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as strategically useful.
Did the Funding Help Hamas Carry Out October 7?
There is no publicly established accounting trail showing that a particular Qatari dollar approved by Netanyahu purchased a particular weapon used in the October 7 attack.
That would be an unnecessarily narrow standard, however, for evaluating whether the policy strengthened Hamas.
For years, outside financing helped cover costs associated with governing Gaza. Israeli officials interviewed after October 7 acknowledged that this allowed Hamas to consolidate its rule, while Israeli governments operated under the assumption that giving Hamas economic incentives would make it more interested in governing and less interested in a major war.
That assumption proved catastrophically wrong.
TIME’s reporting described the pre-October 7 concept as an effort to give Hamas something to lose by improving the economic circumstances under which it governed Gaza. Former Netanyahu ambassador Michael Oren subsequently said the strategy had been mistaken.
The responsible conclusion is therefore not that Netanyahu secretly financed the October 7 operation.
There is no evidence establishing that.
The stronger evidence-based conclusion is that Netanyahu supported a financial and political strategy that helped sustain Hamas’s government for years, underestimated the danger Hamas posed, and treated continued Hamas rule as compatible with Israel’s strategic interests.
October 7 demonstrated the enormous consequences of that miscalculation.
So, Did Israel Fund Hamas?
If “fund” is being used in the ordinary political sense—meaning to provide, arrange, approve, facilitate, or maintain financial support—the answer is yes.
Israel under Netanyahu:
approved Qatari financial transfers into Hamas-controlled Gaza; allowed millions of dollars in physical cash to cross Israeli territory; supported payments to employees of the Hamas-run government; continued the arrangement despite substantial Israeli opposition; and pursued a broader policy in which Hamas’s continued control of Gaza served as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority.
The source of most of that money was Qatar.
But Netanyahu’s government was an active participant in the system that enabled it to reach Gaza and sustain the Hamas-controlled administration.
Calling that “funding Hamas” is not a conspiracy theory.
It is a condensed description of an extensively documented Israeli policy.
The legitimate debate concerns the next layer: Netanyahu’s intentions, how much money reached Hamas’s military wing, what Israeli intelligence knew at different points, and whether preserving Hamas was principally a containment strategy, an anti-Palestinian-state strategy, or—as the evidence increasingly suggests—a combination of both.
Why Would Netanyahu Want Hamas to Remain in Power?
Netanyahu did not need Hamas to be friendly toward Israel for Hamas’s continued existence to serve a political purpose.
As long as Hamas controlled Gaza and the Palestinian Authority controlled parts of the West Bank, Netanyahu could point to Palestinian political fragmentation as a reason that negotiations toward an independent Palestinian state were impractical.
The strategy effectively created a paradox:
Israel could identify Hamas as a dangerous enemy while simultaneously benefiting politically from Hamas remaining the dominant Palestinian authority in Gaza.
That is why the 2019 report about Netanyahu linking the Qatari transfers to preventing Palestinian statehood matters so much. It suggests that the division itself was not simply an unfortunate reality Israel tolerated. It was, at minimum, a reality Netanyahu believed could advance his political objectives.
From a Palestinian perspective, that distinction is fundamental. A population divided between rival governments was weaker diplomatically, weaker institutionally, and less capable of presenting a unified claim to sovereignty.
The financing of Hamas-controlled Gaza therefore cannot be understood solely as an Israeli effort to prevent hunger or sewage systems from collapsing.
It also belongs within the history of Israeli policy toward Palestinian political fragmentation.
Did Israel Create Hamas?
That is a different claim and should not be confused with the funding question.
Hamas emerged from Palestinian Islamist movements and developed its own leadership, ideology, institutions, financing networks, and military apparatus.
There is a separate historical debate about Israeli policies toward Palestinian Islamist organizations in the decades before Hamas’s founding and whether Israel tolerated or encouraged Islamist institutions as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.
But that is not necessary to establish what happened under Netanyahu.
The modern evidence stands on its own:
Netanyahu’s governments approved and facilitated financial support that sustained Hamas-controlled Gaza, and Netanyahu reportedly viewed Hamas’s separation from the Palestinian Authority as useful to preventing Palestinian statehood.
The Bottom Line
So, did Benjamin Netanyahu fund Hamas?
Yes—in the politically meaningful and historically relevant sense.
Netanyahu did not need to be the original source of the money for his government to participate in funding Hamas’s rule.
His governments approved and facilitated large Qatari transfers into Hamas-controlled Gaza. They allowed millions of dollars in cash to cross through Israeli territory. Netanyahu defended the arrangement. The money helped finance the government Hamas controlled. Senior Israeli officials warned that the policy strengthened Hamas. And Netanyahu was reported to have explicitly connected maintaining Hamas-controlled Gaza with preventing Palestinian political unity and Palestinian statehood.
What remains disputed is narrower: exactly how much of the Qatari money was diverted to Hamas’s military wing and precisely what Netanyahu was told about that diversion before October 7.
Those uncertainties should be acknowledged.
They should not be used to obscure the much larger fact that is already documented:
Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately supported a financial policy that helped keep Hamas’s government alive and Palestinian political leadership divided.
That policy was a choice.
And its consequences became part of the history of October 7 and the devastating war that followed.
References and Further Reading
- Reuters — “Qatar Pays Gaza Salaries to Ease Tensions; Israel Says Money’s Not for Hamas” — Contemporary November 2018 reporting on the first $15 million cash payment and Israeli approval of the arrangement.
- The Jerusalem Post — “Netanyahu: Money to Hamas Part of Strategy to Keep Palestinians Divided” — March 2019 reporting on Netanyahu’s comments to Likud members connecting Gaza funding with Palestinian political division.
- CNN/Shomrim — “Qatar Sent Millions to Gaza for Years — With Israel’s Backing” — Investigation into Israeli approval of the Qatari payments and objections from former Israeli officials.
- TIME — “Fact-Checking Netanyahu’s 2024 TIME Interview” — Examination of Netanyahu’s claim that the Qatari arrangement was not “bankrolling Hamas.”
- TIME — “Benjamin Netanyahu at War” — Netanyahu’s explanation of the policy and interviews with former Israeli officials about the strategy behind it.
- The Times of Israel — “Netanyahu Was Warned Twice That Qatari Cash Was Funding Hamas Military Wing — Reports” — Reporting on disputed allegations that Israeli intelligence warned Netanyahu in 2019 and 2020 about diversion of Qatari funds.
