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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/21/hamas-gaza-war-financial-crisis/
Hamas Facing Financial and Administrative Crisis as Revenue Dries Up
(Washington Post) Shira Rubin - Hamas is facing its worst financial and administrative crisis in its four-decade history. "Hamas is not rebuilding their tunnels, they're not paying their highly trained fighters, they're only surviving," said Oded Ailam, former head of the Counterterrorism Division in the Mossad, and now a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. Nor can the Hamas administration meet the payroll of police and ministry employees in Gaza, or continue to pay death benefits to the families of fighters killed. Earlier in the war, Hamas relied on taxes imposed on commercial shipments and the seizure of humanitarian goods. Hamas profited "especially off the aid that had cost them nothing but whose prices they hike up," said a Gazan contractor. He saw Hamas routinely collect 20,000 shekels ($6,000) from local merchants, threatening to confiscate their trucks if they did not pay. Hamas civil servants threatened several times to kill him or call him a collaborator with Israel if he did not cooperate with their demands to divert aid. He knew at least two aid truck drivers who were killed by Hamas for refusing to pay.