Netanyahu denies allowing Qatari funds to strengthen Hamas

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied that he allowed Qatar to fund and strengthen Hamas in order to politically divide Palestinians, according to a report in Politico on Tuesday.

Critics have long accused the premier of boosting Hamas in an attempt to play it off against the Palestinian Authority.

"It’s a big lie that I wanted to build Hamas. Ridiculous," Netanyahu told Axel Springer, Politico's parent company. "You don’t go to war three times with Hamas or do major military operations if you want to build up Hamas."

In 2019, Netanyahu told Likud's annual conference: "Anyone who wants to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas." 

But he denied that allowing Qatari funds into the besieged enclave was linked to strengthening Hamas. 

"We wanted to avoid a civilian humanitarian collapse - disease, rampant hunger and other things that would have created an impossible humanitarian situation," he said.

"That’s why successive Israeli governments allowed this money to go in, not in order to strengthen Hamas. We didn’t want to strengthen Hamas at all. We wanted to weaken it and degrade its capabilities as far as we could."