By Steve Winston, Managing Director, National Jewish Assembly
Governments, we are told, exist to secure the life, liberty and property of their citizens. Not to serve as the unwitting financial arm of a genocidal Islamist regime. And yet, here we are.
The British Government has been caught red-handed: knowingly pumping tens of millions of pounds in taxpayer money into Gaza through intermediaries working with – and in some cases under the direction of – Hamas. The same Hamas that launched a pogrom on October 7, butchered Israeli families in their homes, burned children alive, and still holds hostages beneath the ground.
This isn’t some well-meaning bureaucratic mistake. This is policy – documented, deliberate, and now exposed. Thanks to the painstaking work of NGO Monitor, we now know that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) understood full well that its cash assistance programmes in Gaza were being coordinated with the so-called Ministry of Social Development – an entity run by Hamas.
That’s not conjecture. It’s printed in their own risk matrix, where this obvious terror finance concern was downgraded to a mere “reputational risk.” Let that sink in. The UK government was not alarmed that British taxpayer funds might end up bolstering Hamas’s rule. It was alarmed that people might find out.
It is one thing for foreign aid to be wasted. That happens. It is quite another for foreign aid to be knowingly redirected to the arms of a proscribed terrorist organisation.
Since October 7, the British Government has handed over approximately £100 million in aid to the West Bank and Gaza. Much of it flows through opaque, unaccountable NGOs, who are then trusted – without question – to vet their own local partners. The result? British aid reaches organisations with open ties to the PFLP, a Marxist terror group responsible for bombings, hijackings and murders. Some of these same “aid workers” are now standing trial in Israel for killing civilians, including a 17-year-old girl.
Ask yourself: would this level of due diligence be tolerated in any other field of public spending? Would we accept the Department of Health outsourcing hospital security to a firm affiliated with al-Qaeda, provided they filled in the paperwork correctly?
Of course not. But in the gilded world of foreign aid, where emotion eclipses reason and good intentions excuse everything, we are asked to suspend judgment. To say nothing, even when the money is flowing into hands stained with blood.
This is what happens when government is permitted to operate beyond scrutiny. Billions allocated in the name of “stability” or “humanitarian need” become, in effect, a blank cheque. No performance metrics. No meaningful oversight. And absolutely no accountability when things go wrong – even catastrophically wrong.
Libertarians have long warned that bloated government agencies, far removed from the people they allegedly serve, will always prioritise institutional self-preservation over effectiveness. What we are seeing in Gaza is not the exception. It is the rule. An entire apparatus whose first reflex, when confronted with evidence of terror financing, is not to intervene but to manage public relations.
Every pound misallocated to Hamas is a pound used to dig another tunnel, manufacture another rocket, train another killer. And every time the British state funds these networks under the guise of “social development,” it makes a mockery of its own anti-terrorism laws. Enough.
It is time to impose a total and immediate freeze on all British aid to Palestinian-linked organisations operating in Gaza and the West Bank. No more money to NGOs coordinating with Hamas. No more reliance on partner self-vetting. No more subsidies for masked men with Kalashnikovs. And no more treating taxpayers like bottomless wallets for morally bankrupt experiments in appeasement.
There must be a public, independent inquiry into how this happened – not another internal review, not a press release, but real accountability. The British people deserve to know why their hard-earned money was used to support the infrastructure of terrorism. Foreign aid, like all government spending, demands scrutiny. When it goes wrong, the price isn’t just inefficiency. It is death, war, and ruin.
