The Guardian carries a story where Israel has smeared a Palestinian individual, one of the largest charities, World Vision and, of course, Hamas.
Mohammed El Halabi, a 38-year-old head of World Vision’s Gaza office, has been under Israeli detention for over five years awaiting his trial for embezzling $7.2m a year, for the past seven years, diverting the money Hamas, which he is also accused of being a secret member of. More than $1m a year had been alleged by Israeli authorities to have been delivered in cash to combat units. In total, Halabi was accused of stealing up to $50m meant for desperate Palestinians and giving it to Hamas to buy rockets and build tunnels. The Israeli government had long accused Hamas of diverting international aid intended for Gaza to fund its wars against the Jewish state. Following Halabi's arrest many foreign governments, including Australia and Germany, stopped all funding to World Vision’s projects in Gaza. The Australians threatened to cut all funding to World Vision globally, about $40m a year. World Vision’s leaders had seen no evidence of Halabi’s alleged wrongdoings, but the Israeli accusations threatened not just their support to Palestinians but the charity’s entire future. If Hamas had indeed breached World Vision’s systems, it meant all their work was vulnerable to manipulation.
If found guilty, he faces decades in prison. The prosecution rested heavily on secret evidence, some of which even the defence team say they were not allowed to view, prompting a UN special rapporteur to condemn proceedings as “not worthy of a democratic state”. Halabi has been offered a series of plea deals, but he has rejected them all. His current lawyer claims Halabi received offers that would have led to his immediate release with time served, allowing him to return to his wife and children in Gaza. But Halabi insists he is innocent of the charges and has refused to make a deal.
The arguments in court concluded in July this year, but Halabi remains in prison awaiting a verdict, which is expected this autumn.
Israel’s case has been undermined by an independent forensic audit of World Vision’s operations, conducted by one of the world’s largest accountancy firms, which found no funds missing and no evidence of criminal activity.
Aid agencies cannot deal with Hamas for fear of falling foul of sanctions. Large aid organisations have implemented strict processes to try to prevent money being co-opted or stolen – known as aid diversion.
Itay Epshtain, a special adviser to the Norwegian Refugee Council, which also provides aid in Gaza, described the rigorous mechanisms charities adopt to prevent aid diversion. “You do repeat monitoring – going back to check multiple times that if you provided a water pump or a hospital bed it is still there and operating as it should be. On top of that you have pre-planned and continuous external auditing to check how every dollar is spent.”
In Gaza there was additional scrutiny as the Israeli government and some monitor organisations routinely make “bad faith” allegations that aid is being stolen by Hamas.
The Israeli charge sheet listed 12 accusations against Halabi. Most are nearly impossible to assess without seeing the secret evidence the Israelis claimed to have. But others were easier to investigate. Halabi was accused of working with two agricultural companies, Al-Atar and Arcoma, which allegedly had ties to Hamas. The charge sheet claimed that, as head of World Vision’s Gaza office, Halabi had rigged the bidding process to ensure the two companies won “nearly all” contracts for providing food aid. Halabi and the companies then allegedly conspired to overcharge World Vision for their services and funnelled the extra cash to Hamas. World Vision total contracts with Al-Atar were worth a little over $30,000 a year for the past decade. The contracts awarded to Arcoma, amounted to about $80,000 a year. Between them, the two companies had won fewer than 50% of the bids for contracts with World Vision they entered, the organisation said.
In March 2017, the Australian government completed a review of its funding of World Vision in Gaza – it had given them $8.1m for Gaza projects between 2014 and 2016, more than 25% of World Vision’s entire Gaza budget, the charity told me. The Australian government concluded that there was no evidence any funds had been diverted.
DLA Piper and auditors from Deloitte conducted a year-long investigation. Between 20 and 30 staff worked full-time, reviewing World Vision’s operations for the five years before Halabi’s arrest.
“We have done a number of other investigations, both corporate and NGO, where we find evidence of malfeasance,” Brett Ingerman, a managing partner with DLA Piper, told me. “We know what we are looking for, we know the ways that people who are trying to divert funds generally operate. I do NGO investigations in difficult parts of the world … and I did not see anything out of the ordinary here from a control perspective,” Ingerman said.
They had “more than sufficient documentation” to complete their investigation. The team carried out more than 70 interviews, including with former and current World Vision employees, and reviewed 280,000 emails. Deloitte reviewed every payment the organisation made over five years. They found no sign of any missing funds, and no evidence Halabi was working for Hamas – in fact, they reported that he consistently sought to distance World Vision from them.
Australia and Germany quietly reinstated funding, on the basis of the report’s findings. World Vision waited for the Israeli court to drop the charges against Halabi. The case drags on.
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