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"I don't believe in peace, no. I don't believe, sorry." the Arabic and Hebrew teacher said. "I understand Hamas don't want it."
... She said students were being paid to watch over them. "I heard them say... 70 shekels for a day," she said. "It's a lot of money in Gaza because they have no work. And if you have work not with Hamas, it's no more than 20 shekels for a day," she said.
From Financial Times:
www.ft.com - Armed gangs stage bank heists in Gaza
Lenders robbed at gunpoint lose $120mn as Palestinians queue for days to rescue their own cash - FT, 2024 June 19
|------- Armed gangs, including Hamas-backed groups, have plundered at least $120mn from banks in northern Gaza in just the past two months, according to UN estimates, as the war-ravaged strip suffers from a severe cash crunch.
The thefts amounted to at least a third of the cash stored in stranded vaults, according to mid-May estimates seen by the Financial Times. About $240mn more is sealed in bank vaults in northern Gaza, some entombed in concrete to try to prevent looting ...
... The most dramatic bank robberies took place on April 17 and 18, shortly after the Bank of Palestine ... opted to pour concrete around the vault of its branch in the once-upmarket district of Rimal.
The emergency measure made no difference. An explosion rang out at the branch on April 17... Thieves absconded with an estimated $31mn in various currencies, according to an internal document sent to the bank's shareholders and seen by the FT.
The next day, the bank told customers and merchants to come to the remaining branch so they could withdraw their deposits before more cash was stolen. Instead, when they opened the doors, they found "armed groups already inside the branch." ...
The bank estimated that $36mn was taken in this second heist, "confiscated on orders ... from the highest authority in Gaza", a veiled reference to Hamas...
While the robberies threatened the Bank of Palestine's employees, the more than $70mn stolen does not threaten its stability given its overall $5.41bn in customer deposits, most of which - along with the lion's share of its business - is in the West Bank. At the start of the war its liquidity coverage ratio, a common metric for short-term financial health, was more than 740%, compared with less than 200 per cent for US and UK banks...
Banking officials are careful not to directly blame Hamas, but this amount of money in the hands of the "highest authority" is likely to fuel an already evolving insurgency against the Israeli military, said two Israeli officials.
The two large-scale robberies capped a theft spree that had begun earlier on a more modest scale: by April, about $7mn had already been stolen from Bank of Palestine branches, mostly from the ATM cassettes, by armed gangs that "drilled into" the buildings ...
The thefts came as Gazans, most of whom live in poverty, struggle to find banknotes to buy essential supplies as inflation spirals following eight months of war ...
Further worsening cash shortages, wealthy Palestinians have sent tens of millions to an Egyptian tour operator, which demands $5,000 a person in crisp new $100 bills ... to enable them to flee Gaza.
Before the war, Gaza had more than 90 cash machines and 56 branches of banks... All dealt mostly in Israeli shekels after the 1990s Oslo agreements reinforced their position as the de facto currency...
Cash was moved in armoured cars, with Israel's facilitation from Gaza... to West Bank where the banks and Palestine Monetary Authority are based. The Bank of Israel would trade soiled banknotes for new, or allow fresh injections of currency, sometimes in Brinks trucks, during periods of calm. ...
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