In 2021, State Department officials warned that “there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza” and asked for a special exemption from sanctions on funding terrorists.
In 2022, Biden met with Palestinian Authority terror leader Mahmoud Abbas and boasted that, “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.”
While the Biden administration kept the assessment that it was at high risk of funding Hamas secret, the results could be seen in real time. After the Trump administration and congress cut off foreign aid to the terrorist areas in the West Bank and Gaza, the number of terrorist attacks dropped sharply. So did the casualties. In all of 2020, only three Israelis were killed.
In 2021, when Biden restored aid to the terrorists, Israeli casualties shot up 900%.
They have since consistently risen every year Biden was in office, up another 82% from 2021 to 2022. Even before the horrifying atrocities of the conclusion of the Jewish High Holy Days, twice as many Israelis had been killed in one month of Biden than in one year of Trump.
The money kept on rolling in even days before the attacks. On September 23, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield declared herself “proud to announce the United States is providing more than $73 million in additional funding to support UNRWA”.
In the first days of October, Secretary of State Blinken overrode a hold by Senator Jim Risch on $75 million in funding for UNRWA, which is largely staffed by Hamas. Risch had imposed a hold along with other Republican senators, requiring that Blinken certify every 180 days that UNRWA meets accountability criteria because of its “long history of employing people connected to terrorist movements like Hamas” and “using its schools to store Hamas weapons.”
“It is unthinkable that U.S. taxpayer dollars would be used to help fund such an organization,” Sen. Risch stated.
It was extremely ‘thinkable’ to the Biden administration which knew that it was the case. Despite that it authorized $148 million in aid in the weeks before Hamas launched its attack on Israel. Of that money, $75 million would be directly used for “humanitarian” purposes in Gaza.
Even after 9 Americans have been murdered and more taken hostage (a number that is likely to increase), no halt on aid and no review of past aid has been announced. There is every reason to think that payments to UNRWA will be made regardless of whether they benefit Hamas.
Biden’s UN Ambassador revealed that “in 2023 alone, the United States has contributed more than $296 million to UNRWA. And the Biden Administration has contributed nearly $1 billion since 2021.” Millions, tens of millions of that money, was inevitably used to murder, torture and behead concert goers, to fire rockets, to kidnap children and to finance Hamas operations.
After the High Holy Days atrocities, the European Union announced that it was halting its aid.
“The scale of terror and brutality against Israel and its people is a turning point. There can be no business as usual. As the biggest donor of the Palestinians, the European Commission is putting its full development portfolio under review, worth a total of EUR 691m,” the EU’s Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Oliver Varhelyi announced. “All payments immediately suspended. All projects put under review. All new budget proposals, including for 2023 postponed until further notice. Comprehensive assessment of the whole portfolio.”
“We will put all development aid payments on ice for the time being,” Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg stated. “The scale of the terror is so horrendous. It’s such a fracture that one cannot go back to business as usual.”
No such announcement has come out of the Biden administration. The EU has reacted with shock and horror to rapes, murders and caged children. There’s been nothing like it in D.C. Samantha Power tweeted a condemnation of Hamas, but made no mention of an end or even a review of USAID funding. Secretary of State Blinken likewise offered nothing on foreign aid. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield claimed to be “outraged and horrified” at the “appalling unprovoked, brutal attacks by Hamas terrorists”, but made no mention of ending aid to them.
That should be taken to mean that the Biden administration will go on funding the terrorists.
The European statements only highlight the callousness and lack of humanity in the Biden administration which has offered press releases, but no deviation from its pre-existing agenda.
Before this, the Biden administration was aware that there was a “high risk” that it was funding Hamas. And it could see rising violence and deaths keeping peace with the money it was sending into terrorist areas. Despite that it kept it up. Earlier this year it dispatched $148 million to UNRWA despite widely documented evidence that the UN agency’s workforce is dominated by Hamas terrorists who use its infrastructure to store weapons and carry out attacks.
While the Biden administration was sending hundreds of millions to the terrorists, it was enabling billions of dollars to make their way to Iran which was funding and training them.
The recent release of $6 billion to Iran through its Qatari allies, who also serve as state sponsors of Hamas, was only the latest in a series of payments that, like those of the Obama administration, illicitly bypassed American laws, in this case by going through South Korea.
Even more significantly, the Biden administration failed to enforce sanctions on Iran’s oil shipments to China. While officially the sanctions remained in place, the Islamic terrorist state was swimming in Chinese money from its massive increase in shipments to the PRC.
Beyond the $6 billion in the prisoner swap deal, the Biden administration had covertly agreed to stop intercepting and seizing Iranian oil tankers allowing the terror state to move 1.6 million barrels to China a day. Under Biden, Iran has been able to gain $47 billion from its China trade.
In September, Iman Nasseri, the managing director of the FGE energy consulting firm, suggested that, “I think Iranians have been given unwritten confirmation … that there won’t be any further sanctions on the crude buyers as long as they are engaged in the unofficial negotiations.”
The Biden administration was covertly undermining sanctions even while claiming that they were still in place. Iran’s newfound wealth was used to launch attacks on Americans in Iraq and to finance the extensive infrastructure and planning for the High Holy Days atrocities.
It is unknown how much of the sanctions relief to Iran and the foreign aid to the terrorist areas in Israel financed the High Holy Days atrocities, but there is no doubt that such sizable infusions of money would have played a role in making the unprecedented scale of the attacks possible.
And the Biden administration isn’t even expressing regret or imposing a pause on aid.
The devastating attacks, the murdered Israelis, the raped women and the caged children, fulfilled the foreign policy aims of the Biden administration which were to weaken Israel, and specifically Prime Minister Netanyahu, and to make the terrorists into the focus of negotiations, replacing the anti-Iran Abraham Accords with another round of anti-Israel peace talks.
The Biden administration was warned that its aid money would go to Hamas. It watched terrorist attacks increase every year that money resumed flowing to the terrorist areas. It filled its administration with advocates for terrorism against Israel including its envoy to the terrorists, Hady Amr, and now its policies paid off with the worst day of terror in Israel’s history.
Terrorism costs money. And we’re the ones paying for it.
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