For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.
During his meetings in September with the Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the secret discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked a question that had not been on the agenda: Did Israel want the payments to continue?
Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha.
Allowing the payments — billions of dollars over roughly a decade — was a gamble by Mr. Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting.
Mr Levy - who was head of economic warfare in the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, until 2016 - says he told Mr Netanyahu many times that Israel had the means to crush Hamas, which controls Gaza, “by using only financial tools”.
Mr Levy says he never got a response to his proposal from Mr Netanyahu. When asked if he considered there was a connection between Mr Netanyahu’s alleged reluctance to deal with Hamas’s finances and the 7 October attack, Mr Levy is unequivocal.
“Yes, of course,” he says. “There is a very good chance that… we would [have] prevent[ed] a lot of the money” that had gone into Gaza, and that “the monster that Hamas built probably [wouldn’t be] like the same monster that we faced on October 7th.”