Don’t believe fake news regarding our aid to the Palestinian people! Regarding more generally our aid to the Palestinian people, it has been said sometime that it is being used to finance Hamas. It is simply not true. We are monitoring very precisely where our funds go and they go to cover the basic needs of the Palestinian population. We are ready to review it one more time, and the Commission will do this review. But Europeans should not tolerate false accusations nor disseminate fake news that undermine our difficult work on the ground.
There is no doubt that every other major Western donor to Gaza truly believes that this is the case.
Yet somehow Hamas has been able to build a tunnel network that is more than double the length of the New York subway system tunnels.
This requires millions of tons of concrete. That concrete requires hundreds of thousands of tons of cement. And cement is all imported into Gaza.
The cement arrives through the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, an elaborate method that Israel agreed to in 2014 where all dual-use building materials and items imported into Gaza are vetted and only given to approved Gaza contractors for specific Gaza projects, like water waste treatment plants. The webpage for the GRM attempts to be as transparent as possible to show where all the materials go.
Clearly, everyone - including Israel - underestimated the iron-clad level of control Hamas has over every aspect of Gaza.
Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades is estimated to have 30,000 members, and associated terror groups probably about 10,000 more. That means that about one in every 15 adult males in Gaza is a terrorist - they are in every building, every school, every mosque, every hospital, every factory, every NGO, and of course every building contractor. And there are at least that many employed in the Hamas government itself, which means perhaps one in seven adult males can be considered to be an informant, at least.
Hamas can get the hundreds of thousands of tons of cement it needs is by skimming off perhaps 10% of every single ton imported into Gaza, forcing the contractors to overestimate the amount of cement needed for valid projects so the accountants in the EU and elsewhere cannot find any discrepancies.
The Free Press published a story yesterday that is seemingly unrelated but it has everything to do with this:
RAFAH—On Saturday, December 30, our front door was busted down, and twenty masked men barged in and took my father, a widely respected and deeply learned imam here in Gaza.One dragged him by his head, and another grabbed him by his beard. My younger brother tried to intervene and reason with the kidnappers, but they beat him. I have a medical condition that makes it hard for me to breathe, so all I could do was watch as the horror unfolded.I know that if Hamas kills my father, they’ll say that the Israeli army did it. But my father was very keen that even if he died, we should make known the despicable demands they made of him. It was his last request to us, literally as he was being carried out of the door, that should he die, we should publicize the real reason for his death, and it is this:He wouldn’t preach what Hamas told him to. He refused to tell Gazans that violent resistance, and obedience to Hamas, is the best way out of our current hell.
This gives a small idea of how Hamas controls every aspect of Gazans' lives, no matter how trivial. And it maintains much of this power even today.
Every single person in Gaza is either Hamas, a supporter of Hamas, an informant for Hamas or deathly afraid of Hamas. Every reporter, every doctor, every factory worker, every farmer, every mother, every child. They have been conditioned to only tell reporters, NGOs and Westerners what Hamas allows them to say - or else.
Not one scrap of information that comes out of Gaza from a person who lives there or whose family lives there can be trusted. It is no coincidence that over the years, the only scraps of anti-Hamas information that comes out of Gaza is anonymously sourced. We've seen lots of cases of "eyewitnesses" and medical workers blaming Israel for things that were later proven to have never happened. We've known for many years that Hamas directly threatens journalists to only write what Hamas wants them to write.
As the story of the imam shows, Hamas tortures, imprisons and kills Gazans who do not toe the line. In the past Hamas has used the fog of war to kill its political enemies and blame their deaths on Israel. Every single story that comes out of Gaza of civilians being shot by IDF troops is not just suspect but must be assumed to be lies. Obviously many civilians are dying in airstrikes aimed at terror targets, but the numbers and circumstances are not to be believed.
The Western world cannot even conceive of the level of control Hamas has over Gaza. But if they trust the information that comes out of Gaza, how do they explain where all that cement came from?
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