By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
In a recent Congressional hearing, the former chief operating officer of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) testified that the American agency had helped fund the Hamas terrorist organization with no oversight of how the money was spent.
At a mid-February House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Max Primorac said that “USAID’s humanitarian aid system is broken. In Gaza, American aid financed Hamas’ campaign to exterminate Israel.”
“Similarly in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria,” he continued, “where we lack physical presence to ensure that our aid is not being diverted to terrorists.”
When asked by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Ten), Gregg Roman, executive director of conservative Middle East Forum (MEF) think tank, detailed several instances of funds reaching terror groups.
“We have assisted Al-Shabab in Somalia, the Hamzi network in Sudan, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah…dozens of terrorist organizations have received indirect assistance from U.S. foreign aid,” he said.
In Gaza, he noted, “$2.1 billion in American tax payers’ money” has gone to the Hamas-ruled Strip “since October 7 [2023], when Hamas invaded southern Israel.”
“USAID money was going in terms of an emergency use authorization” to parties with whom the agency “had a formal relationship,” he said, but several government agencies that should have checked the recipients before the money transfers were made did not do so.
These included being vetted against the Special Designated Terrorists list of the State Department, he said.
“Waivers were granted,” he said, “because they said there was an emergency…thereby jettisoning the usual typical screening procedures. As a result, 90% of the aid that was going from the United States by way of its agents in Gaza ended up in Hamas-controlled areas, and this is ridiculous.”
“Essentially what the U.S. assistance to Gaza did was underwrite the ability of Hamas to survive until the ceasefire that just passed a few weeks ago,” he concluded.
Primorac noted that during his tenure in the first Trump administration, “we had a regulation in place that anyone who touches money in countries where there are terrorists, those names have to go through terrorist databases. That was overturned by [former president Joe] Biden.”
In a follow-up hearing Wednesday, Roman said that MEF had “uncovered evidence of $164 million in approved grants, $122 million of which ended up supporting radical or terror-tied organizations,” over the last decade and a half.
One example he gave of such recipients was the Unlimited Friends Association in Gaza, whose officials “have called for their lands to be cleansed from the impurity of the Jews,” he said.
“Primary grantees are entrusted to vet their own subcontractors, even when those grantees themselves might sympathize with radical causes,” he testified.
“In places like Gaza or Sudan, groups with blatant extremist affiliations slip through because the ‘gatekeepers’ have no incentive—or even ideological desire—to shut them out. This isn’t a glitch; it’s a feature of a broken system.”
“It’s a not just waste, fraud, and abuse, this is a national security problem,” Roman noted, and urged the Committee “to make a formal criminal referral to the Department of Justice regarding USAID’s systemic failure to prevent taxpayer dollars from reaching terrorist organizations.”
Content retrieved from: https://worldisraelnews.com/us-funded-hamas-campaign-to-exterminate-israel-says-ex-usaid-official/.
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