Israel asked Qatar to increase the financial assistance it was giving to Gaza one month before the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre, the Yedioth Aharonoth daily reported Friday.

In September 2023, Israeli officials met at a Jerusalem hotel with Mohammed al-Emadi, the Qatari envoy to Gaza, who oversaw the delivery of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from Qatar to Gaza between 2018 and 2021, the report said. There, they asked him to increase the amount of fuel purchased from Egypt by Doha for the benefit of Gaza’s Hamas government.

Qatar, since 2021, had been purchasing fuel from Egypt, which it would then gift to Hamas in Gaza. The fuel was then sold by the terror group to gas stations inside the Strip, thus bringing money to the regime to pay its own officials and commanders.

Israel was a tacit party to the arrangement, which allowed it to avoid directly funding the terror group’s government while still propping it up to keep the Strip stable.

About a month before al-Emadi’s meeting in Jerusalem, the Qatari diplomat visited the Strip to meet with then-Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar.

The terror leader, like Israel would the following month, asked al-Emadi to increase Doha’s fuel purchases from $3 million a month to $7 million a month. Al-Emadi told Sinwar that Qatar wasn’t willing to do that, according to the report.

A month later, however,........

© The Times of Israel