Transparency & Accountability
Bank of Palestine posted $57 million profit as Gaza accounts froze
Transparency & AccountabilityGraphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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Bank of Palestine reported a $57.0 million profit for 2025, of which $53.4 million was attributable to shareholders, and its board asked and won approval to pay out $21.5 million in dividends — 8 percent of paid-up capital — according to the bank's own consolidated financial statements for the year. Total assets grew 27.4 percent to $10.65 billion.
Who owns Gaza's largest bank#
The bank's founding Shawa family has historically held roughly a third of its shares, with the rest split between Palestinian institutional and individual investors and a foreign minority. Hashim Shawa, who became chairman and chief executive in 2007 after his father's death, still leads the bank.
In 2025 the ownership base widened further: the bank raised fresh capital through a private share offering that brought in three international development lenders as strategic partners — France's Proparco, the International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with the EBRD taking a stake of up to 3.92 percent and the IFC up to 5 percent, both institutions' own disclosures show.
The same year as the freezes#
This paper's reporting on Bank of Palestine's Gaza account freezes, published 5 September, recorded a bank that dismissed its Gaza staff by phone, closed the accounts of the dead and returned to profit and paid a dividend in the same year, without saying how many customers it had cut off.
The 2025 results confirm the profit and the dividend; the bank has not published a customer-level accounting of the freezes for the Palestinian Bar Association or the National Defence Commission, both of which say they are still seeking one.
Bank of Palestine is listed on the Palestine Exchange under the ticker BOP and is the exchange's largest listed company by market value.
