…there is news about hamas leader, ismail haniyeh.
Would you be surprised to find out that haniyeh (and a host of other hamas big-shots) have become rich in recent years? You shouldn’t be.
After all, when yasir arafat died, his estate was estimated, depending on which account you read, anywhere from $200 million to $1.3 billion dollars. And mahmoud abbas, the current Palestinian Authority dictator of Judea and Samaria (aka the west bank) has a net worth estimated at $100 million.
Did you really think that money was going to the people???? If so, it’s wake-up time.
But back to ismail haniyeh. Here, from Gianlucca Pacchiani’s article for the Times of Israel, is your answer to how he, and his pals in power, do it:
Shortly after the start of Hamas’s brutal attack against Israel on October 7, a video began circulating of the terror group’s leader Ismail Haniyeh in his elegant office in the Qatari capital Doha, watching the bloody onslaught unfold on Al Jazeera and “prostrating in gratitude” with a group of other Hamas officials for the killing of over 1,300 Israelis, among them at least 1,000 civilians.
For years, Haniyeh has been rebuked by many Palestinians for leading a comfortable life away from the hardships of Gaza in the oil-rich Gulf monarchy, which offers shelter to the terror group’s leaders and an internationally recognized platform to spread its propaganda through Al Jazeera.
He was appointed prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and his wealth rapidly grew thanks to the control that he and other ministers in the Hamas government exerted over the Gazan economy and the taxes they levied on goods imported into the Strip from Egypt.
A senior PA official alleged that the tunnel-smuggling market had transformed 1,700 senior Hamas officials into millionaires, according to a report in Saudi weekly Al-Majalla.
In 2010, Haniyeh spent $4 million on a plot of land on the Gazan beachfront near the Shati refugee camp where he grew up, which he registered under his son-in-law’s name, according to Egyptian magazine Rose al-Yusuf.
Since then, Haniyeh has purchased several apartments, villas and buildings in the Gaza Strip, registered in the names of some of his 13 children.
His lavish holdings contrast sharply with endemic poverty in the Gaza Strip, where some half of the population is unemployed, and per capita GDP was around $5,600 annually in 2021, making it one of the poorest places in the world.
Translation: the mass murderers who run hamas do not give a damn about the well-being of their own people. They get rich on money that should be benefiting those people. And, as a logical consequence, the money they abscond with contributes to the poverty so many Gazans find themselves in.
Hey, why build infrastructure or create job opportunities for your people when you can use the money to live it up in luxury?
Asking again: does this surprise you?
If so, I suspect you might also be surprised to find out that the sun rises in the east and that birds have been known to fly.
