The German daily Die Welt reports that the European Commission’s Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) has concluded that tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, donated by the EU to the PA has been utilized for terrorist operations against Israel.
Surprise! surprise!
The findings, which have deliberately been covered up, confirm Israeli allegations that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has diverted millions of dollars in EU funding to the Fatah Tanzim and Hamas terrorist organizations.
This has been pointed out in posts here on Rantburg, in the last few weeks
The OLAF findings are based upon documents recovered from the PA headquarters by Israeli military forces during the course of Operation Defensive Shield. OLAF agents recently visited Jerusalem to be briefed by Israeli security officials and to ascertain the authenticity of the documents. The OLAF investigators have accepted that the captured documents are genuine and evidence of Arafat’s wide-spread diversion of the EU’s humanitarian aid to Palestinian terrorist operations that targeted Israeli civilians. The Israeli documents had been presented to the EU’s Commissioner for External Affairs Chris Patten last year. Patten, however, refused to recognize their authenticity and denied they established that Arafat was using EU funds for terror attacks. Under increasing pressure from European parliament members, Patten was forced to order an OLAF investigation into the Israeli allegations.
| Patten's credibility drops a bit further, not that it's got much further room to drop... |
The documents include letters signed by Arafat ordering payments to eleven terrorist leaders for what he termed guerilla operations. In addition, there are receipts for the payments of the mortgages of the families of Hamas suicide bombers, as well as a cash awards of several thousand dollars to the family members. Other documents detail how European funds were used by the PA’s Preventative Security Forces to stage "spontaneous" demonstrations in support of imprisoned Fatah Tanzim Marwan Barghouti, who was placed on trial in Israel for masterminding terror attacks that killed 26 Israelis.
| Things like that happen when you dump loads of money into Paleostine with no controls, not even a receipt... |
Following the signing of the Oslo Accords, the EU pledged to provide funding to the PA for civilian projects, primarily to pay the salaries of the PA’s municipal workers. The EU donates approximately $10 million a month and more than $1.5 billion to the PA since 1994. The plaintiffs allege that the EU failed to undertake any steps to monitor or scrutinize how the PA was utilizing the donated money.
OLAF has not denied the veracity of the report. It denied having been pressured to keep the results of the investigation under wraps, saying that it had not been published because it was still incomplete. It also complained that the article was based on confidential "in camera" briefings that had been leaked.
| And how's that different from keeping it "under wraps"? |
In May 2002 Shurat HaDin, a non-profit Israeli Law Center filed a NIS 100,000,000 civil action against the EU on behalf of the Blumberg family in the Tel Aviv District Court. According to the suit, on August 5, 2001, Palestinian police officers moonlighting as Fatah-Tanzim terrorists opened fire from another vehicle at the Blumberg’s car, killing 35 year old Tehiya Blumberg, a mother of five children pregnant at the time of the attack. Her husband Steve and their daughter Zipporah were severely injured. The Blumberg law suit, which is brought by attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, alleges that the EU recklessly provided the PA with massive sums of financial aid, while knowing that the money was being diverted from its intended civilian purposes to Palestinian terrorist groups. The court papers assert that the EU was repeatedly warned by Israel that its aid was financing Palestinian attacks on Israelis. The OLAF report should be immediately released to the public and the EU’s aid to the PA suspended for good," said Shurat HaDin Director Darshan-Leitner. "Without the EU’s reckless provision of financing to the Palestinians, hundreds of Israeli terror victims would still be alive and thousands of others would never have had to suffer their tragic injuries", Darshan-Leitner said. "European taxpayers must now acknowledge that they are the ones who have been financing the Palestinian terror attacks and accept that they must pay compensation to the families of the victims", added Darshan-Leitner. |