PA, UK Move Against Hamas Charities
Jerusalem — (August 29, 2003 – ICEJ) — Officials from the Palestinian Authority froze the bank accounts of nine Islamic charities affiliated with the Hamas terror group Thursday, as part of a clampdown on armed groups demanded by the United States in the wake of last week’s Jerusalem bus bombing.
Britain, the staunchest US ally in Europe followed suit Wednesday by ordering the bank accounts of a UK-based Palestinian aid organization Interpal to be frozen after President George W. Bush accused it of being a front for Hamas. Four other charities identified by the US continued to operate as normal, three of them in Europe after France, Switzerland and Austria declined to take similar action.
The order to shut down 39 accounts of nine charities was issued separately by the Palestinian Monetary Authority on Sunday, but only came to light Thursday, when hundreds of Palestinians relying on welfare payments tried to pick up their monthly support checks at banks in Gaza City. The nine are believed to receive funds directly from the other European based charities identified by Bush as supporting terrorist activity, according to The Jerusalem Post.
Hamas leaders disputed any links to the charities and said the PA is acting under US and Israeli pressure. The charities “have nothing to do with Hamas, and will not affect Hamas, but will affect the poor families,” spokesman Abdel Aziz Rantisi said.
Throughout the past three years of violence, the PA has increasingly stopped providing welfare services, and private Islamic charities receiving large sums of money from abroad have filled the void. PA leaders, current Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas among them have repeatedly asked wealthy Arab donors to support the PA rather than Hamas-affiliated charities, which have only strengthened the Islamic group’s grip on Palestinian political affairs.
European governments remain deeply divided over American appeals to view Hamas’ political and charitable arms as indivisible from its military and terrorist activities. While the British and Dutch are pushing to add more Hamas-linked groups to the list of banned terror organizations when the EU foreign ministers meet in Italy to discuss the issue next weekend, France, Belgium and others are reluctant for fear of cutting off avenues of negotiation with the Palestinians.
According to Israeli Defense sources such charitable institutions “are only ways for Hamas to broaden its terrorist infrastructure and must not be seen as separate from Hamas itself.” But France in particular is concerned that harming Hamas’ social work would only create more Palestinian hardship and risk a still more violent backlash.
Hamas “is regarded as a legitimate movement and party within Palestinian society … 97 or 98 percent of the movement’s activity is geared toward social needs,” Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland told AP, implying that the organizations political and military wings can act separately – one doing good for poor Palestinians and the other killing Israelis.
Others, including the Bush administration, disagree. “There is no Chinese wall. The money that goes in there is used in both directions and anyone who would say otherwise is engaging in wishful thinking or being outright deceptive,” said Dan Mulvenna, a professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Washington.