RAMALLAH, 27 February 2004 — The Palestinian central bank chief accused Israel yesterday of armed robbery after Israeli troops seized over $8 million from banks in this West Bank city.
Israeli troops said Wednesday’s raids on three banks were aimed to empty accounts used by Palestinians to fund suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis.
“(This is) baseless and untrue,” Amin Haddad, head of the Palestinian Monetary Authority, said in an interview.
“What happened yesterday was a blunt, unjustified ungrounded daylight theft at gunpoint by the Israeli Army from two Jordanian banks operating in Palestine, as well as the Arab Bank and the Cairo-Amman Bank,” he said.
Local newspapers quoted Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, whose efforts to reform Palestinian finances have won Western praise, as saying the raid was another serious blow to a Palestinian economy crippled by Israeli Army crackdowns.
Haddad said Israeli forces singled out 400 institutional, charity and individual accounts, commandeering vaults, counting out money and putting what they wanted into bags for removal. A number of larger accounts were cleaned out, he said.
Haddad gave two examples of affected institutions — Gaza’s Islamic University and the Zakat Committees, a group overseeing small donations to the poor required of every Muslim.
“Is the Islamic University a terrorist organization? The Zakat Committees... have a proven track record of apolitical activities and all their work is charity.”
He said it was telling that Israeli authorities had not bothered to monitor the accounts for a period to check on suspicious activity.
“Very obviously what they did wasn’t related to terrorist activity. If you investigate an account, you trace it. None of the accounts were traced,” Haddad said.
Palestinians rushed to the banks to find out the fate of their savings. Individual account holders did not immediately report anything missing, but were alarmed.
“What the Israelis are looking for is chaos. (Our people) have a lot of doubts, thousands of questions,” Haddad said.
He said the raid violated a 2003 accord between Israel, the United States and the Palestinians stipulating that Israel make a request to the Palestinian Authority or to Washington if it wanted to probe accounts in Palestinian areas.
The United States said the raid could destabilize the fragile Palestinian banking system and called on Israel to coordinate such moves with Palestinian authorities.
“What happened yesterday is totally rejected and the money that was stolen should be repaid,” Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmad Qorie said after meeting Haddad and his finance and economic ministers later to weigh the fallout from the raid.
“This assault aims at the destruction of the Palestinian Authority,” he added.
