Time documents show Israel helped move about $2 billion from Qatar to Gaza

Documents obtained by the American magazine TIME indicate that Israel played an active role in channelling Qatari money into the Gaza Strip over a period of more than a decade, according to several Israeli outlets that reported on the investigation. Ynet reported that the papers show Israel helped transfer 2 billion dollars from Qatar to Gaza, while Axios correspondent Barak Ravid described the total as almost 2 billion dollars.

The documents also suggest that Israeli officials privately asked Qatar to keep the money flowing at times when senior figures were criticising the arrangement in public. According to Israel Hayom, the papers show that the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu requested that Doha keep funds going into Gaza, and The Jerusalem Post wrote that, according to TIME, successive Israeli governments were involved and that Israel urged Doha to continue despite the public criticism.

What the documents reportedly contain

Among the material, Israel Hayom said, is a letter written in December 2020 by Yossi Cohen, who was then director of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency. In it, Cohen conveyed thanks and appreciation to Qatar for what the letter described as its humanitarian work. Ynet characterised the same correspondence as Cohen thanking the Emir of Qatar.

Ynet highlighted two further items. One concerns a senior official at the National Security Council, a body known in Hebrew by the acronym Mal"al that advises the prime minister on security and foreign policy, who is said to have sought the continuation of the payments. The other is a request from Barnea, as Ynet names him, to renew the funding. Ynet places that request two weeks before the Hamas-led attack on Israel of October 7, referred to in Israel as 7/10.

Warnings before the letter

Ynet tied the TIME findings to its own earlier reporting. According to the outlet, Netanyahu had received testimonies more than a year before Cohen's letter of thanks indicating that Qatari money was reaching Hamas and contributing to the group's military build-up. Ynet presents this as a contrast between what the prime minister had been told and the gratitude later expressed to Doha. That claim comes from Ynet's previous work rather than from the TIME documents themselves, as Ynet describes it.

Why the Qatari money matters

Qatar, a small Gulf state, has been one of the main outside funders of Gaza, the coastal territory run by Hamas. For years, the transfers were a subject of political argument inside Israel. Supporters within the security establishment presented them as a way to ease humanitarian conditions and reduce pressure for escalation. Critics argued that money entering Gaza under Hamas rule could end up strengthening the group.

After the October 7 attack, that debate became sharper, because the attack prompted wide questioning in Israel of the assumptions that had shaped policy toward Gaza. The reports on the TIME investigation centre on the gap between the public posture of some officials, who criticised Qatar's funding, and the private requests that the documents are said to show.

How the outlets framed it

The four reports agree on the core finding: TIME obtained documents pointing to deep Israeli involvement in the transfer of Qatari funds to Gaza. They differ in emphasis. Israel Hayom and The Jerusalem Post focused on Israeli requests that Qatar keep paying while officials spoke against the funding in public. Ynet focused on the scale of the money, the role of individual officials and the timing of the last request relative to the October 7 attack. Ravid, writing on X, drew attention to the size of the sum.

There is a small discrepancy on the figure. Ynet gives 2 billion dollars, while Ravid says almost 2 billion dollars. The other two reports, as available to us, do not state an amount.

What the reports do not say

The material available does not reproduce the TIME article itself, so the full set of documents, how the magazine obtained them and how it verified them are not described here. The reports do not include any response from Netanyahu, Cohen, Barnea, the National Security Council or the government of Qatar. They do not identify the National Security Council official by name. They do not explain how the roughly 2 billion dollars was broken down, over which exact years it moved, or what mechanisms carried it into Gaza. Nor do they say what, if anything, came of the request to renew the funding shortly before October 7. The Jerusalem Post account available to us is truncated, so its full description of the findings could not be checked.