The prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, insisted his country, which has funded Hamas for years and hosts the heads of the group in Doha, has no power or influence over them.
Al Thani spoke at an Atlantic Council event as Qatar has been criticized for its unwillingness to pressure Hamas into releasing Israeli hostages.
“Our role needs to be understood clearly in this context, our role is mediator, we try to bring the parties to bridge gaps between them,” Al Thani said, as Jewish Insider reported. “We don’t see that Qatar is a superpower that can impose something on this party or the other party to bring them to that place.”
“Qatar is Hamas’ most important financial backer and foreign ally. Qatari Emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani was the first state leader to visit the Hamas government in 2012. So far, the emirate has transferred €1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) to Hamas,” Deutsche Welle noted in 2021. “Doha pledged $360 million of annual support to the enclave in January 2021, in part to subsidize government salaries,” FDD pointed out, adding, “Ismail Haniyeh, the chief of Hamas’s political bureau, resides in Qatar, as do Khalil al-Hayya, head of Hamas’s communications office, and Khaled Mashal, Hamas’s former political chief and current head of the group’s diaspora office.”
“It doesn’t mean that being there, hosting them is a leverage that we have over them,” Al Thani continued. “We don’t see that this is a point of leverage. We see this as a point, as a channel of communication that we are using, always for good causes.”
NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius who moderated the event, reportedly did not ask the prime minister directly about his country’s financial support of Hamas.
Commenting on reports that a dozen U.N. Relief and Works Agency employees participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, Al Thani said the organization “cannot be punished because of the acts of some employees” as long as the organization is “complying with” their internal procedures, adding, “It’s a behavior of an individual or small group of people among tens of thousands… it cannot be a way to label the entire agency as violating or adopting such [an] act.”
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“Neither Al Thani nor the event’s moderators addressed a report in the Wall Street Journal that 1,200 UNRWA employees are members of Hamas, and around half of its employees have close ties to Hamas members,” Jewish Insider noted.