Hamas facing financial and administrative crisis as revenue dries up

Hamas profited “especially off the aid that had cost them nothing but whose prices they hike up,” said a Gazan contractor who has worked at Gaza’s border crossings during the war.

Over nearly two years, he said, he saw Hamas routinely collect 20,000 shekels (about $6,000) from local merchants, threatening to confiscate their trucks if they did not pay. He recalled that civil servants for the Hamas-led government said several times that they would kill him or call him a collaborator with Israel if he did not cooperate with their demands to divert aid. He said he refused. But he added that he knew at least two aid truck drivers who he said were killed by Hamas for refusing to pay.

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“Hamas sees aid as its most important currency,” said a man from Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, who helps manage the distribution of aid. He said that while most of the population had to scrape for water and food, people affiliated with Hamas had been gifted boxes of aid meant for wider distribution.

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“One of the reasons that Hamas is pushing for a return to the old system is that they have guys in all of the warehouses,” said a Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the news media. The presence of employees of the Gaza government allows Hamas to regulate and monitor market activities, as well as tax or seize some of the supplies at times, said a high-level Israeli official.

Hamas claims that the terror group handed its response to the Israeli ceasefire proposal to mediators, Hamas's official news agency SAFA reported on Thursday morning.

This follows an Israeli official telling The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that Hamas has yet to deliver an official response to the Israeli proposal that was submitted a week ago and is now raising new demands on issues that had already been resolved.

The hostage-ceasefire deal mediators refused to relay Hamas’s response to Israel’s proposed deal on Tuesday, saying it was not a serious answer, two people familiar with the matter told the Post.

At a meeting with representatives from Qatar and Egypt in Doha on Tuesday, Hamas officials responded to the framework. “This is not a serious response,” the mediators told them, according to the informed sources. “Go back and draft a new one.”

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