For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip – money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu had not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.
Allowing the payments – billions of dollars over roughly a decade – was a gamble by Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the October 7th attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting.
As far back as December 2012, Netanyahu told prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Margalit, in an interview, said Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.
“The conception of Netanyahu over a decade and a half was that if we buy quiet and pretend the problem isn’t there, we can wait it out and it will fade away,” said Eyal Hulata, Israel’s national security adviser from July 2021 until the beginning of this year.
Qatar’s work in Gaza during this period was blessed by the Israeli government. And Netanyahu even lobbied Washington on Qatar’s behalf. In 2017, as Republicans pushed to impose financial sanctions on Qatar over its support for Hamas, he dispatched senior intelligence officials to Washington. The Israelis told US lawmakers that Qatar had played a positive role in the Gaza Strip, according to three people familiar with the trip.
Israel’s goal was “to ensure that the next confrontation between Israel and Hamas will be the final showdown”, he wrote in the memo, dated December 21st, 2016. A pre-emptive strike, he said, could remove most of the “leadership of the military wing of Hamas”.