Israeli Press
The Board of Peace denies a $400 million debt deal with Hamas
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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A number in the Gaza roadmap became an accusation this week, and the body that wrote the roadmap spent Wednesday taking it back apart.
Israel's public broadcaster Kan reported that wording in the fifteen-point disarmament plan was loose enough to hand Hamas as much as $400 million in debt relief. The claim travelled quickly through the Israeli press, where the opposition leader Avigdor Liberman put a figure of $160 million on what he said the movement's military wing would receive.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace envoy, called the reported deal false and said no such proposal had been discussed, negotiated, or would be entertained.
His account of clause five is narrower than either version. The incoming Palestinian technocratic body — the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza — is directed to assess legitimate commitments to suppliers and contractors up to a $400 million ceiling, with payments released only where the work is verified and background checks exclude anyone tied to an armed group.
The rest of the money, in his description, is severance for Gaza's civil servants: the clerks, engineers, teachers and hospital administrators the new administration does not hire.
That is the part Gaza reads first. Tens of thousands of families have gone through the war on an intermittent fraction of a salary, and the plan now contains a line about paying some of them to leave their posts.
Who counts as a legitimate contractor, and who decides, remains with a committee that has not yet taken office.
