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The claim by Israel's Shin Bet security service that a senior aid worker in Gaza diverted millions in aid money to Hamas caused shock and amazement around the world.
Mohammed el Halabi, director of the Gaza branch of the giant aid agency World Vision, was arrested by the Israelis. He was accused of using more than half the charity's resources in Gaza, made up from humanitarian donations by western governments such as Britain and the US, to fund Hamas's terrorist activities through arms purchases and the construction of tunnels to facilitate terrorist attacks.
Shin Bet said el Halabi, who confessed, had initiated fictitious projects meant to help farmers, the disabled and fishermen. Food and medical aid was allegedly not sent to Gaza's needy but to Hamas operatives and their families.
People expressed astonishment when Israel subsequently charged a Palestinian employee of the UN Development Programme, engineer Waheed Borsh, with providing "material assistance" to Hamas.
Why the surprise? Everyone with any knowledge of Gaza understands that nothing happens there without its Hamas protection racket owning it in some way.
We fund the Palestinians to reward terrorism
"Hamastan" is an infrastructure of mass murder, much of it concealed beneath the earth. Israeli officials have claimed that every month, Hamas builds another six miles of tunnels whose sole purpose is to deliver killers and weapons to wipe out as many Israelis as possible. A Hamas operative captured by the Israelis last June revealed that terrorists can travel underground throughout the whole of Gaza.
Millions of tons of cement, ostensibly intended to rebuild Gazan homes, have been poured into this tunnel network. Meanwhile the UN looks the other way.
Bo Schack, the Director of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, complained last April with a straight face that a shortfall in donations meant too few houses were being rebuilt. He even had the gall to blame Israel for stopping cement from entering.
Yet Dore Gold, Director-General of Israel's Foreign Ministry, told the UN World Humanitarian Summit last May that out of every 100 sacks of cement entering Gaza from Israel, only five or six are transferred to civilians. The rest are diverted to construct the monstrous apparatus of mass killing.
This is not all. El Halabi is said to have divulged intelligence about employees working for UN agencies and other aid groups who were also assisting Hamas. Shin Bet says his statements "portray a troubling picture in which UN institutions in Gaza are in fact controlled by the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas."
Borsh admitted in turn that "other Palestinians who work for aid organisations are also working for Hamas". You don't say.
Many if not most Unwra employees in Gaza either support Hamas or are under its tyrannical thumb. As for aid agencies such as World Vision, Save the Children, Oxfam and more, the tireless work done by NGO Monitor has long exposed the way Palestinian corruption, tyranny and terrorism simply gets sanitised or excused.
Their aim is not to help oppressed Palestinians but to demonise Israel. That makes them ideological fellow travellers with the Arab and Muslim purveyors of anti-Jewish hatred, tyranny and terror. So why should anyone be surprised if these murderous links to the UN or World Vision are closer still?
For the UN and NGOs, however, it's business as usual. World Vision has dismissed Israel's claims, saying the NGO is regularly audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
But as NGO Monitor's president, Gerald Steinberg, has observed, no international auditing firm can independently track funds in terror enclaves. These will continue to operate with impunity unless western governments stop providing them with the funds to continue their murderous activities, from incitement to terrorism.
Western governments indirectly fund Hamas through the NGOs. They also give Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority money with which it rewards the families of those who kill Jews. By some estimates, this amounts to more than one third of all the Palestinians' overseas aid.
These western nations fund the Palestinians to incite, pay for and reward genocidal terrorism. Indeed, western governments are the unacknowledged villains of this story.
According to Shin Bet, a Hamas military base was constructed last year with British aid money. When will someone ask the British government how it justifies subsidising mass murder?
When will western taxpayers ask their governments why they are funding, and thus perpetuating, the Arab and Muslim war against the Jews?
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist
