Qatar pays Gaza staff’s salaries to ease tensions
GAZA: A $15 million Qatari cash infusion was paid out to impoverished Palestinian civil servants in the Gaza Strip on Friday, offering the enclave’s dominant Hamas a potential domestic reprieve though Israel said the money would not go to them.
Palestinian sources said the Qatari payout, received on Thursday, was the first of a total of $90 million that would come into Gaza over the next six months with Israeli approval.
Israel had previously agreed to the Gulf Arab state donating materials for civilian construction projects or fuel, worried that more fungible cash donations could reach Hamas, with which it has fought three wars in a decade.
“One day, I have no money to get food or medicine for my children — and now I will buy them food, medicine and clothes,” said Wael Abu Assi, a traffic policeman, outside a Gaza City post office where people queued to draw their salaries.
Hamas has been under years of embargo by Israel and neighbouring Egypt. Hamas leaders said in the past they had received funds from other countries.
Observers for Qatar were present at all 12 post offices across Gaza to monitor the salary disbursements. Employees had to present their identity card and be finger-printed.
“Long live Qatar!” shouted youths who greeting Doha’s point-man for Gaza relief efforts, Mohammed al Emadi, at a site near the border with Israel which has seen frequent demonstrations.
“Long live Gaza!” he replied. But as the diplomat’s convoy departed, some youths threw stones that smashed a window on his bodyguards’ car — suggesting not all Palestinian protesters were pleased with Qatar’s intervention. Al Emadi’s car was unscathed.
Qatar’s official news agency said the donated money would benefit 27,000 civil servants. “The salaries for the others will be paid from local revenue,” it said.
Hamas has hired over 40,000 people in Gaza since 2007 but many appeared to have been excluded from the list of payees.
“They told me they don’t have money for me,” one employee said on condition that he would not be named. “Maybe Israel vetoed my name?”
Officials from Hamas, Qatar and Israel have been largely silent about the details of the Gaza payouts arrangement.
But a member of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet played down their significance.
“This is not money that is going to Hamas activities. It is money that is going to the salaries of civil servants, in an orderly, organised manner,” Environment Minister Zeev Elkin told Tel Aviv radio station 102 FM.
Elkin accused Abbas, whose peace talks with Netanyahu stalled in 2014 and who is boycotting the United States because of its proisrael policies, of cutting salaries to “inflame Gaza, because he has not been successful on other fronts”.
Palestinian sources said the Qatari payout, received on Thursday, was the first of a total of $90 million that would come into Gaza over the next six months with Israeli approval