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Alleged $50M Theft By Charity’s Employee Seems Impossible

However, both Hamas and the World Vision Charity denied Israeli allegations that al-Halabi passed millions of dollars to the group.

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Abu Zuhri called on the worldwide community to bear its responsibility over such “practices which could have risky consequences”.

Borsh told investigators during his interrogation that in 2014, he was directed by Hamas to “focus on his work in the UNDP in a way that would allow Hamas to extract the greatest possible benefit from him”, the Shin Bet said, according to the Times of Israel.

In a statement on Tuesday, Shin Bet (ISA) said Waheed Borsh, 38, had been arrested on 16 July.

They also said some 60% of World Vision’s annual funds designated to Gaza had been funneled to Hamas in recent years.

Reacting on Twitter, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon described UNDP as the “latest victim of Hamas”, adding that global aid money, “sorely needed by the Gaza population”, had been “stolen for terror purposes”.

On Monday the United Nations expressed “serious concerns” over the World Vision allegations.

But following a meeting between its president and senior Israeli officials, those words were removed from the statement by Friday morning.

In 2003 Borsh started working for the UNDP, one of the world’s largest development and aid organisations.

No figures were provided on how much aid Borsh allegedly diverted and the charge sheet provided by the justice ministry did not say he joined Hamas.

Israel said it had arrested and charged a United Nations employee for allegedly aiding Islamist movement Hamas, in the second such case involving a humanitarian worker in a week.

The arrest of Waheed Borsh, an engineer for the United Nations Development Project (UNDP), follows last week’s indictment of Mohammad al-Halabi, Gaza director of global Christian charity World Vision, who was similarly accused of redirecting some $7 million a year from the charity to Hamas. Perhaps the most interesting revelation about what el-Halabi has said to Shin Bet was hinted at last week.

Israeli court documents accused the Save the Children member of being enlisted in Hamas’s armed wing.

The organization noted that the amount of money Israel says el-Halabi diverted, well over $30 million over five years, surpassed the total budget for its Gaza offices in the last decade.

Israeli authorities claimed the individual was recruited because of “connections” between Save the Children and the United States Agency for International Development.

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The worldwide charity World Vision says Israel has accused the charity’s Gaza Strip director of funneling what appears to be an impossible sum of money to Hamas. But according to declassified intelligence reports, these supplies are routinely stolen by Hamas in order to serve the group’s terrorist purposes.

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