Mossad Chief's 2020 Letter Surfaces in Qatar Funding Documents

TIME on Sunday published undisclosed documents, including letters from senior Israeli security officials to Qatari leaders, that it says show Israel encouraged and played a direct role in a payment program for Gaza more extensive than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly acknowledged. The Jerusalem Post reports the papers include a 2020 letter from then-Mossad director Yossi Cohen to Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, thanking Qatar for its aid to Gaza and calling it crucial to humanitarian conditions and regional stability. The Post says the documents also show Israeli requests to keep the arrangement going even as senior officials criticized Doha in public.

According to the Post, TIME based its investigation on official correspondence and testimony from senior Israeli, American and Arab officials. It found that successive Israeli governments helped establish, operate and preserve the Qatari assistance mechanism for Hamas-controlled Gaza for years. TIME reports that by 2012, Netanyahu's government had approved a system that gave Israel a direct role: delivering food and medical supplies, deciding which Palestinian families qualified for financial aid, disbursing the funds, and enabling Qatari financing to expand Gaza's electricity supply.

A senior official in the first Trump administration told TIME that the contradiction aggravated the Qataris. Israeli officials would denounce the payments in public, then privately ask Doha to renew them. TIME reports that Qatar demanded written documentation of Israel's involvement in 2018, and a diplomat briefed on the process told the magazine that Qatar wanted Washington to understand exactly how the system worked, fearing Israel might later accuse Doha of financing Hamas without acknowledging its own role.

The Post says a July 2019 letter in the investigation shows Qatar notified Netanyahu's government of a $6 million transfer to 20,000 beneficiaries selected by Israel, with each receiving $300. TIME noted it remains unclear how many recipients were tied to Hamas or had relatives in the organization. TIME also reports that when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cut payments to government workers in Gaza in 2018, Israeli security officials shuttled Qatari cash into the Strip in suitcases.

The arrangement continued under former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who had been one of its sharpest critics as a minister in Netanyahu's government, the Post reports. As prime minister, Bennett ended the suitcases of cash but kept the broader Qatari program. A former senior Biden administration official told TIME that Qatar was preparing to end the program at the time, and an official present at a conversation between an Israeli representative and a U.S. envoy said Israel's message was: "We want to continue this as it is."

About two weeks before the October 7, 2023 attack, David Barnea, who led the Mossad at the time, traveled to Doha and asked for a renewal of the Qatari funding, as The New York Times had previously reported. According to TIME, Qatari officials agreed but warned it would be the final extension. The Post says that in 2023 Qatari officials sought to change the aid system to reduce civilians' dependence on both Hamas and the Israeli government, while Netanyahu's government sought to keep the existing framework. A former senior Israeli defense official told TIME: "It was a policy failure on our part, born out of good intentions and continued by several prime ministers."