Shin Bet: PFLP Diverted Humanitarian Funds From Europe to Finance Terrorism

A Shin Bet investigation has revealed that European funds designated for humanitarian activities were diverted to the financing of militant terror activities by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization in Yehudah and the Shomron.

During the course of the Shin Bet’s activities, carried out in cooperation with the IDF and Israel Police, a financing mechanism for the PFLP terrorist organization was discovered. The mechanism operates by exploiting funds that were transferred by assistance agencies and NGOs active in Europe.

It was further discovered that the funding was transferred to Palestinian institutions and organizations in the West Bank, which in practice are affiliated with the PFLP and operate under the guise of humanitarian work. At the center of these institutions is an organization by the name of the “Health Work Committee.”

In the Shin Bet’s investigation of those involved, it became clear that these organizations defrauded and deceived several European countries in order to receive extensive amounts of funding, in the scope of millions of euros.

The investigation also revealed that a significant part of the funding went, in practice, to PFLP terrorist activities.

The PFLP institutions deceived assistance organizations in Europe through a number of methods – by reporting on fictitious projects, transferring false documents, forging and inflating invoices, diverting tenders, forging documents and bank signatures, reporting inflated salaries, and more. The extensive funding received was transferred to payments for the families of PFLP martyrs, salaries for operatives, the recruitment of new operatives for the organization, the advancement of terrorist activities and growth, the promotion of PFLP activities in Yerushalayim, the promotion and dissemination of the organization’s messages and ideology, and more.

During the course of the Shin Bet’s investigation, the suspects gave up extensive material that educates as to the scope of the fraud that PFLP institutions carried out against European countries. The information pointed to the diversion of considerable amounts of funding, received from official governmental institutions in Europe, toward the financing of the PFLP’s organizational and terrorist activities.

Indictments will be filed in the military court in Yehudah in the coming days.

A senior Shin Bet official said: “The comprehensive financial activities that the PFLP has carried out join a long list of terrorist activities that have been neutralized by the Shin Bet in recent years. The PFLP is a murderous terrorist organization, which was responsible for the bombing attack in 2019 in which Rina Shnerb, Hy”d, was murdered while visiting the Ein Bubin spring with her family. The Shin Bet will continue to work toward the neutralization of the terrorist and financial infrastructures of the PFLP, an organization which constantly works to undermine security stability in the West Bank and to promote organizational and militant terrorist activities against Israel.”