Hamas officials receive Qatari-funded salaries

90 million dollars is to be distributed in six monthly instalments, primarily to cover salaries of officials working for Hamas in Gaza Strip.

GAZA CITY - Palestinian civil servants formed long queues in Gaza on Friday to receive Qatari-funded salaries, as part of efforts to ease tensions in and around the impoverished territory.

A total of $90 million is to be distributed with Israeli approval in six monthly instalments of $15 million, according to authorities, primarily to cover salaries of officials working for Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Palestinian enclave.

The first $15 million cash infusion was paid out to civil servants on Friday, offering Hamas leaders a potential domestic reprieve though Israel said the money would not go to them. 

The cash was driven into the Palestinian enclave through Israel late Thursday by Qatar's envoy to Gaza, Mohammad al-Emadi, according to a government source in Gaza.

Hamas's political rival based in the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has slashed Gaza budgets, leaving tens of thousands of government employees impoverished. That has helped stoke a half-year of bloody protests and occasional shelling exchanges with Israeli troops across the fence separating Gaza, which Israel keeps under blockade.

Israel had previously agreed to Qatar donating materials for civilian construction projects or fuel, worried that more fungible cash donations could reach Hamas guerrillas, with which it has fought three wars in a decade.

"One day, I have no money to get food or medicine for my children - and now I will buy them food, medicine and clothes," said Wael Abu Assi, a traffic policeman, outside a Gaza City post office where people queued to draw their salaries.

Some exited post offices, where the first instalment was being distributed, to show off hundred-dollar bills before the cameras.

Qatar, which has no diplomatic relationship with Israel, is a longtime ally of Hamas, considered by the United States, European Union and Jewish state a terrorist organisation. 

Hamas has been under years of embargo by Israel and neighbouring Egypt. Hamas leaders said in the past they had received funds from other countries including Iran.

In an Israeli-approved deal, Qatar has started buying additional fuel for Gaza's sole power station, allowing planned outages to be reduced to their lowest level in recent years.

Egypt and the United Nations have been brokering indirect negotiations for a long-term truce with Israel, with which Hamas has fought three wars since 2008.

Observers for Qatar were present at all 12 post offices across Gaza to monitor the salary disbursements. Employees had to present their identity card and be finger-printed.

Convoy stoned

"Long live Qatar!" shouted youths who greeting Doha's point-man for Gaza relief efforts, Mohammed Al-Emadi, at a site near the Gaza fence which has seen frequent demonstrations.

"Long live Gaza!" he replied. But as the diplomat's convoy departed, some youths threw stones that smashed a window on his bodyguards' car - suggesting not all Palestinian protesters were pleased with Qatar's intervention. Al-Emadi's car was unscathed.

Qatar's official news agency said the donated money would benefit 27,000 civil servants. "The salaries for the others will be paid from local revenue," it said.

Hamas has hired over 40,000 people in Gaza since 2007 but many appeared to have been excluded from the list of payees.

"They told me they don't have money for me," one employee told Reuters on condition tat he would not be named. "Maybe Israel vetoed my name?"

Officials from Hamas, Qatar and Israel have been largely silent about the details of the Gaza payouts arrangement.

But a member of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet played down their significance.

"This is not money that is going to Hamas activities. It is money that is going to the salaries of civil servants, in an orderly, organised manner," Environment Minister Zeev Elkin told Tel Aviv radio station 102 FM.

Elkin accused Abbas, whose peace talks with Netanyahu stalled in 2014 and who is boycotting the United States because of its pro-Israel policies, of cutting salaries to "inflame Gaza, because he has not been successful on other fronts".

"The Qataris came along and said: 'We are willing to pay this instead of Abu Mazen (Abbas), in order to calm Gaza down'. What does it matter who pays it?" Elkin said.

Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the executive committee of the Abbas-led Palestine Liberation Organization, criticised the move. "Arrangements through Qatar and elsewhere prolong the crisis of Palestinian division," Abu Youssef said.

Doha's donation, as well as UN-Egyptian truce mediation and winter rains, have tamped down the violence at the fence, where Gaza medics say Israeli army fire has killed more than 220 Palestinians since the protests began on March 30.

Israel, which insists lethal force is necessary to stave off Palestinian militants, has lost one soldier to a Gaza sniper and been forced to deal with tracts of forest and farmland burning due to incendiary material flown over the frontier on kites or helium balloons.

"This is one of the fruits of the 'March of Return'," Abraham Baker, a police officer who received a full salary, said, using the Palestinian term for the protests, which demand rights to Palestinian lands that were taken over by Jewish immigrants from Europe in the 1948 war of Israel's founding.