A British Jewish charity based in North London has given nearly £200,000 to a religious school in the heart of one of the most extreme illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian city of Al Khalil (Hebron).
Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron has sent nearly £200,000 to the school between 2019 and 2024, according to The Guardian.
The financial accounts of the charity are available online for public access on the website of the Charity Commission, which affirms the findings.
The school is part of an illegal Israeli settlement that was recently given planning authority by Israeli far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich after he broke a decades-old international agreement over planning and construction restrictions in Al Khalil.
In line with these violations of international law, a new dormitory for the students of the school was approved in June.
The expansion of the settlement following Smotrich’s granting of planning authority to Israel will see the settlement population increase, which is widely regarded as one of the most extreme Israeli communities in the occupied West Bank.
“We want British charities to fund peace, not to fund obstacles for peace. This is very wrong,” said Issa Amro, a Palestinian human rights defender from Al Khalil and co-founder of Youth Against Settlements.
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“The students at this yeshiva are very aggressive. A new building will mean more violence towards Palestinians, more restrictions, more Israeli military presence.”
Building Israeli settlements
The presence of the settlement has been reinforced by extensive systems of militarised separation from the settlers to the native Palestinians, where they are isolated inside Al Khalil.
As a result, Palestinians, who make up 230,000 residents of the city, are completely banned from walking on certain streets as walls and gates divide them from the areas under Israeli military control.
“For this yeshiva (religious school) to exist, thousands of Palestinians have already lost their shops, their housing and their daily livelihood in the heart of a Palestinian city,” said Hagit Ofran, from the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now.
The Hebron Yeshiva actively seeks funding from abroad, specifically in countries that consider the very settlements they are situated in to be illegal, as they collect donations in France, Canada, the UK, and beyond.
The new dormitory has already imposed itself on Palestinian homes, as the exterior framework has built an outpost on the roof of a Palestinian home situated just next door to the school.
Donations
In 2023 alone, the Finchley-based charity, Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron, donated £58,200 to the school, claiming more than £2,000 in Gift Aid from HMRC, according to the publicly available financial accounts.
However, the charity says on its website that it is not registered for Gift Aid.
In 2024, the charity didn’t file full financial accounts due to a lower turnover, but still sent £21,360 to the school in the illegal settlement.
The charity lists its purpose as furthering “such charitable purposes for the benefit of the Jewish people as the trustees see fit, in particular by supporting the educational and charitable work of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron in the State of Israel”.
It makes no mention of Palestine, where its work is being carried out, according to the internationally recognised borders of Palestine.
The British government formally recognised the State of Palestine last year, which marks and includes Hebron as part of its territory.
The charity was one of 32 registered in England and Wales to be identified as those which had donated a total of at least £28m to Israeli settlements in recent years.
Radical settlement in Hebron
The current illegal settlement in Al Khalil where the school is situated was established in 1968, when a group of Israelis disguised as Swiss tourists entered the city of Al Khalil to celebrate Passover.
The group never left, and the trip of the original settlers is widely regarded as the birth of the Israeli settler movement.
Over 30,000 Palestinians live in the part of the city where illegal Israeli military control has been established, where roughly 800 Israeli settlers live under the active protection of the IDF.
The settlers have been steadily taking over Palestinian homes and businesses in the area since the 1990s.
