(JNS) The United Kingdom is one of the chief funders of Hamas, Israel’s Channel 12 “Weekend News” reported on Saturday night.
While a great deal of the money comes from private donations to so-called Muslim “charities,” the investigation revealed that the British government also funds the terrorist group. Admittedly, the money reaches Hamas indirectly, via UNICEF, but the British Foreign Office is aware of the terror connection, as evidenced by an internal 2022 report.
Hamas operates in the United Kingdom almost with impunity, reported Channel 12 journalist Omri Maniv, noting that Israel’s defense establishment refers to it as “Hamas’s financial capital in the West.”
“Britain is one of the three leading countries in the world in the volume of donations flowing from it to Hamas. The others are Muslim countries,” Maniv noted. “In fact, more than a quarter of non-state funding for the terrorist organization comes from the British Isles.”
But London also transfers tens of millions of pounds to Gaza, which ends up in the hands of the terrorist group.
“The British government is actually giving millions of pounds to the U.N., and especially to UNICEF, which works with the Ministry of Social Development in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas,” Anne Herzberg, legal adviser at NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute, told Channel 12.
According to a November 2022 document from the British Consulate-General in Jerusalem uncovered by NGO Monitor, “UK Humanitarian Support in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (FY 2022-2026),” the United Kingdom provided cash transfers to UNICEF, which works with the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Social Development (MoSD).
The MoSD was run by Ramzi Hamad, a senior Hamas leader. Hamad, who left Gaza for Lebanon weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion, in which some 1,200 people were murdered and 251 taken hostage, said the massacre was justified and promised many more such massacres. In October 2024, he said he wanted to annihilate Israel.
The United Kingdom knew that the MoSD was involved in the cash-transfer program and that it was Hamas-run. In its 2022 report, it identified this fact as a “reputational” risk that might reflect poorly on the country were it to be made public.
“British officials appear more concerned about the U.K.’s image than about the dangerous implications of lax counter-terror financing policy,” an NGO Monitor report released on Sunday said.
The exact amount of money provided as part of the cash-transfer project is unclear. “We found the document from 2022, but it might have started earlier,” Herzberg told JNS.
Funds continue to flow even after Oct. 7. “What we do know from the U.N.’s financial tracking system is that the U.K. in 2024 gave UNICEF $23.1 million, and $4.8 million in 2023,” she said.
It is not clear whether all of that money was for the MoSD-related program or others as well. “We’re not sure because it’s not fully transparent,” Herzberg explained.
British Embassy in Israel:
The Ch12 story aired tonight includes irresponsible allegations that we've thoroughly denied. The UK government has never funded Hamas or affiliated Ministries. Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization and funding or supporting it is a crime.
(2/2)— UK in Israel ???????? (@ukinisrael) May 24, 2025
The British embassy in Israel posted to X on Sunday, complaining of the Channel 12 report, saying it “includes irresponsible allegations that we’ve thoroughly denied. The U.K. government has never funded Hamas or affiliated ministries.”
“Instead of calling it irresponsible, give us information,” Herzberg said.
The U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is “largely non-transparent” when it comes to its funding to the region, the NGO Monitor report noted.
For example, the U.K. refused to cooperate when NGO Monitor filed a freedom of information (FOI) request in 2021 with the Foreign Office requesting names of the beneficiaries of an anti-Israel NGO that had received millions of pounds from Britain.
That NGO, the Oslo-based Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), is infamous in Israel for engaging in anti-Israel activities disguised as “humanitarianism.” It made headlines a few years back when it tried to undermine the country’s judicial system by flooding its courts with cases in an attempt to influence domestic Israeli policy.
NRC is also a leading distributor of MoSD-coordinated cash in Gaza, NGO Monitor noted.
Herzberg told JNS that London’s transfer of cash to a program that it knew was linked to a Hamas-controlled entity remains a “good case study” of the entire problem with humanitarian aid in Gaza, where the international community seems to wear “blinders.”
“The most charitable explanation is that they so want to help Gazans that even though they realize some aid might be diverted, they’re willing to pay that price,” she said.
“But the point is they’ve all known for years that Hamas is taking this money to build tunnels and store weapons, and that UNRWA was taken over by Hamas. Yet, they just continue to let the money flow seemingly without any safeguards,” Herzberg said.
