Stuttgart mayor Frank Nopper rebuffed Yesh Atid head MK Yair Lapid’s demand on Tuesday that German authorities pull the plug on Hamas funding streams in Germany.
Lapid told German news organization Die Welt’s TV program that “there are people in Germany who have bank accounts, there are people who perhaps also personally support Hamas activists. And they are working on transferring money to Hamas.”
He added that Hamas’ financial network is “very complicated” and exists across Europe, in Istanbul, and in Qatar. One of the main reasons for Lapid’s visit to Germany was to urge Germany’s finance minister, Christian Lindner, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s security adviser, Jens Plötner, to crackdown on Hamas terror finance in the Federal Republic.
Financing terror
A major hub of terror finance for Hamas and Samidoun is via information on the website of the southern German city of Stuttgart in the state of Baden-Württemberg.
German citizen Shani Louk, who was murdered by Hamas on October 7, has family from Baden-Württemberg.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, a lawyer who leads Israeli legal aid organization Shurat HaDin, told The Jerusalem Post that “Shurat HaDin will be investigating whether allowing the Stuttgart Palestine Committee on its official website would constitute aiding and abetting murderous Hamas and whether Stuttgart and its elected officials can be sued under anti-terrorism laws. It’s shocking that only two months after the brutal murder of Louk by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, that Stuttgart’s mayor is so resistant to shutting down this source of funding to her murderers.”
Lapid told the German outlet about donations to Hamas: “This financing always finances terror.”
The Palestine Committee Stuttgart posting on the city website provides links to its website, Facebook page and email of the group.
Darshan-Leitner added that “it is outrageous that the Stuttgart Palestine Committee would be allowed by Stuttgart to post its information on its homepage. They are plainly soliciting funds for the Islamic terrorists groups in Gaza and are openly displaying their affiliation with the designated and outlawed Samidoun organization. There are no secrets here – only brazen anti-Israel German officials, who never met a Palestinian extremist group they did not sympathize with, want to show love and support to Hamas. And it’s well understood that Hamas’ financial pipelines have been heavily disrupted. The Gaza terrorists are desperately scrambling everywhere for funds to keep their terror war and rockets attacks on Israel going.”
Lapid expressed confidence that the funding streams to Hamas can be disrupted and ended, noting that there is“a lot of good will“ from the side of Germany.