UK charity funding school at heart of illegal Israeli settlement expansion | West Bank
A British charity is funding a religious school at the center of expansion plans for the illegal Israeli settlement in Hebron, Palestine.
Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron sent nearly £200,000 to the school between 2019 and 2024; This year’s accounts are publicly available on the website of the Charity Commission, the charity regulator in England and Wales.
Construction of a new dormitory for the school was approved in June after far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich unilaterally broke a decades-old international agreement on control of Hebron to grant planning authority to Israel.
The expansion will increase the population of one of the most extreme Israeli communities in the occupied West Bank and the only community built in the heart of a Palestinian city.
“We want British charities to fund peace, not the obstacles to peace. This is so wrong,” said Issa Amro, a Palestinian human rights activist from Hebron and co-founder of Youth Against Settlements. “The students in this yeshiva are very aggressive. A new building will mean more violence against Palestinians, more restrictions, more Israeli military presence.”
Israel has established extensive military separation systems to isolate hundreds of settlers in Hebron from the city to which they were relocated. Palestinians are completely barred from some streets, and walls and gates separate Palestinians living in areas under Israeli military control from most of the 230,000 population.
“For this yeshiva to exist, thousands of Palestinians have already lost their shops, homes and daily livelihoods in the heart of a Palestinian city,” said Hagit Ofran of the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now. “The new dormitory is an important development because they add more settlers to Hebron, which is the most extreme settlement where apartheid is everywhere.”
International and Israeli leaders, including the late US president Jimmy Carter, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and former Israeli attorney general Michael Ben-Yair, have said Israel practices apartheid in the occupied West Bank, including Hebron.
Hebron Yeshiva seeks funds from other countries that consider settlements in occupied Palestine illegal and offers donations “with receipts” in France
and Canada. Israeli crowdfunding technology company IsraelGives has also facilitated millions of dollars in funding for settlements for those living in the United States.
The exterior of the new dormitory has been completed, and the Israeli army has built an outpost on the roof of the Palestinian house next door. According to its calculations, in 2023 Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron donated £58,200 to the school and claimed more than £2,000 in gift aid from HMRC. The charity says on its website that it is not registered for gift aid. He sent £21,360 to the school in 2024 after not opening a full account due to low turnover.
Donations from Friends of Yeshivat appear to violate the charity’s own trust charter; this agreement refers to education and charity “in the state of Israel” without any mention of Palestine.
Although Israel has never defined its own borders, the British government officially recognized the state of Palestine in the territory that includes Hebron last year.
The charity was one of 32 organizations registered in England and Wales identified in a letter sent to the commission by Labor MP Melanie Ward on June 1, in which she said they had donated at least £28 million to Israeli settlements in recent years.
According to information obtained by The Guardian, the Charity Commission forwarded the details of the letter to the Metropolitan Police’s war crimes unit, but no investigation was launched.
On 9 June, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told parliament that “charity systems were being misused to provide support for illegal settlements” and that “some evidence suggests rules were being broken”. He said the Charity Commission had been tasked with investigating links to the settlements.
The commission said in a statement that it shared Ward’s concerns. The report added: “However, this remains a complex and controversial issue that touches on broader legal principles regarding the rights of charities to operate and support the most vulnerable in parts of the world where there may be conflict, disputed jurisdiction or lawlessness.”
Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron provides details of the UK account at Barclays Bank to which donors can transfer money. A Barclays spokesman said it could not comment on individual customers but said it “has policies and procedures in place to meet its legal and regulatory obligations, including appropriate due diligence and financial crime controls for charity customers”.
The charity’s contact email was the professional account of trustee Ari Bloom, a partner at the law firm Solomon Taylor & Shaw. Solomon Taylor & Shaw’s switchboard number is listed as the charity’s telephone contact and is registered to the same North London address used by the law firm. Contact details on the Charity Commission website have been changed after the Guardian contacted Solomon Taylor & Shaw and Bloom for comment.
Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron were also reached for comment.
The current yeshiva building and expansion are located on the border of the Israeli-controlled Hebron district. Nadav Weiman, executive director of Breaking the Silence, a group founded by Israeli war veterans to document military abuses in occupied Palestine, said students were throwing rocks at Palestinians from their rooftops. Israeli soldiers, who outnumbered the settlers, converted the rooftops of Palestinian private houses into military outposts to protect the yeshiva complex.
“If communities fund this [new] “They’re financing more violence, they’re financing the next wave that will bring death to Palestinian families and Israeli families,” Weiman said, “Everything that happens in Hebron first happens elsewhere.”
