The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) revealed Monday that suitcases containing cash valued at over $1 million were found in the home of a Hamas official in Gaza — and that the cash, ironically, was held in Israeli currency, totaling about 5 million Israeli shekels.
The Jerusalem Post reported:
Suitcases with funds amounting to over NIS 5 million (about $1.3 million) were found in the home of a senior Hamas member in the [Jabalia] area, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said on Monday.
Additionally, many weapons were found by soldiers from the 551st Brigade in the Hamas member’s home.
As Breitbart News noted last month, many of the senior leaders of Hamas, who live in luxurious exile in Qatar and other Muslim countries, are all billionaires. Many siphon cash from Gaza that ought to be devoted to development projects; some benefit from taxes that Hamas imposes on imports to the territory and that are smuggled through underground tunnels.
One of the reasons Palestinians voted for Hamas in the first, and last, Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 was that it claimed to be an alternative to the corrupt, incumbent Fatah party that still runs the Palestinian Authority government from Ramallah, in the West Bank. (Hamas seized executive power in a coup a year later.)
The Israeli shekel remains the main currency in Gaza, though U.S. dollars and other currencies are also used.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.