One of Hamas’ top three sources of funding is the U.K., where it is a banned terrorist organization, an investigation from Israel’s Channel 12 found. That funding includes 25% of Hamas’ donors from non-state actors, as well as tens of millions of dollars from the government of the U.K. to a UNICEF program whose beneficiaries are determined by Hamas.

The U.K., France and Canada threatened Israel last week with “concrete actions” if it does not lift restrictions on humanitarian aid and work with United Nations agencies to distribute it.

The U.K., Canada and the European Union — of which France is a member— as well as Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Mauritius and Croatia, sponsored a project through UNICEF, the U.N. Children’s Emergency Fund, for which a Hamas-run ministry provides a list of people to receive funding.

The program provides cash payments of $200-$300 per month to 546,000 needy people in Gaza. UNICEF said that it works with a “beneficiary list from the MoSD,” meaning the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Social Development, to determine who receives the cash. The program uses a digital platform funded by USAID to distribute the cash. UNICEF published an update on the program as recently as November 2024. 

MoSD is led by Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ politburo, designated a “senior Hamas official” by the U.S. Treasury Department. 

A 2022 document from the U.K. Foreign Office, uncovered by NGO Monitor, showed that London was aware of Hamas’ involvement with the program and that it had the potential for “severe” reputational damage. 

“The cash assistance component will be implemented in coordination with the Ministry of Social Development MoSD. The MoSD in Gaza is affiliated with the de facto authorities and thus UK Aid can be linked directly or indirectly with supporting the de facto authority (Hamas) in Gaza which is part of a proscribed group,” the document reads.

The U.K. gave about $23.1 million to UNICEF projects in the West Bank and Gaza in 2024, and $4.8 million in 2023. 

NGO Monitor’s legal Advisor, Anne Herzberg, noted that it is unclear how much of that funding went to the Gaza cash program.

“There is very little detail from the U.K. side about how much is going in, what oversight is in place, what exactly they are doing to mitigate the risk” of money going to Hamas, Herzberg told Jewish Insider on Sunday. “A lot of countries are giving funds to the U.N. and just leave it in their hands.” 

Herzberg said that while a lot of attention has gone to UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, which was recently banned from Israel after some of its employees participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, “UNRWA is just the tip of the iceberg, because 13 U.N. agencies are operating in Gaza. There is very little information into how these other U.N. agencies are operating.” 

“Aid diversion is the main problem and why there have been so many issues with humanitarian aid in Gaza,” she said. “It’s inconceivable to me that these governments refuse to deal with this issue. They claim they want to help Palestinians, to end the conflict and bring peace, yet they don’t want to tackle this issue.” 

Beyond government aid going to Hamas, what qualifies the U.K. as the leading non-Muslim country funding Hamas is nongovernmental contributions, Channel 12 reported.

In 2001, Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi founded the Union of Good, a coalition of 50 Islamist charities with connections to Hamas and other proscribed terrorist groups. The group raised hundreds of millions of dollars for Hamas during the Second Intifada.

The organization was banned in the U.S. and U.K., and Qaradawi, who is Egyptian and lives in Doha, Qatar, has been barred from the U.S., U.K. and France.  

Yet the organizations making up the Union of Good continued their fundraising activities.

The Channel 12 report names specific Hamas operatives based in the U.K., including Zahar Birawi, who is the head of the Palestinian Return Center in London, leads Hamas activities in Great Britain and has been instrumental in organizing weekly anti-Israel protests in London. Issam Yusef Mustafa, a former member of the Hamas politburo, is a U.K. citizen and is the biggest fundraiser for Hamas in Europe as the head of “Interpal,” a former Union of Good group sanctioned by the U.S. and Israel.

Herzberg explained that many of the organizations funneling money to Hamas are registered as businesses so they can avoid scrutiny from the Charity Commission.

“The monitoring in the U.K. does not seem as robust as what you see in the U.S., where there are many more investigations going on at the governmental level and more reporting, even though the U.K. government says it has robust control in its laws,” Herzberg said. “It’s unclear how those laws are being enforced.” 

Erez Noy, a former Shin Bet official dealing with terror funding, told Channel 12 that “Hamas is strong in Britain because over the years they got used to being able to do almost anything they want there, compared to other countries in Europe … For years, Britain, for whatever reason, did not handle preventing and taking care of these systems [to fund terror]. When Hamas realizes there is a permissive arena, it tests the limits.” 

Hamas petitioned the U.K. last month to be removed from the country’s list of banned terrorist organizations. 

According to Udi Levy, the former head of the Mossad’s department for fighting terrorism funding, “these are businesses that raise funds under the guise of humanitarian aid, and reach Hamas in Gaza, Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and anywhere else around the world.”

Levy told Channel 12 that “total victory over Hamas is not just in the Gaza Strip. We are making a huge mistake because even if we kill every last ‘soldier’ in Gaza, there is still a massive Hamas infrastructure that will continue to act and even rehabilitate its activities, unless we start taking care of it.” 

The British Embassy in Israel said in response to a query from JI that “Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization in the U.K. and funding or supporting it is a crime. We categorically reject the false and irresponsible allegations in the Channel 12 investigation that the UK Government funds Hamas run agencies in Gaza. No UK funding was provided to the Ministry of Social Development in Gaza … We are clear that Hamas must play no role in the future of Gaza. FCDO [the Foreign Office] conducted a thorough due diligence assessment of UNICEF, and we identify how U.K. funds are transferred until they reach the final beneficiaries.”

The embassy interpreted the claim made by the U.K. Foreign Office that “U.K. Aid can be linked directly or indirectly with supporting the de facto authority (Hamas) in Gaza which is part of a proscribed group,” as referring to the Ministry of Social Development in Ramallah run by the Palestinian Authority.

In addition, the embassy stated that it does “not recognize the claim that 25% of Hamas’s non-state funding comes from the U.K. To our knowledge, no official Israeli body has ever made such a claim.”