by Abul Taher, Mail on Sunday
Senior executives at one of Britain’s biggest Islamic charities privately warned that aid money they had sent to Gaza ‘very likely’ ended up funding Hamas and other terrorist groups, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Penny Appeal – which in its heyday had annual revenues of more than £25million and operated in more than 40 countries – is now the subject of a Charity Commission investigation.
Inspectors searched its £3.5million Wakefield headquarters earlier this year and seized thousands of documents.
The charity donated more than £350,000 to British organisation Programme for NGOs to deliver aid into Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 – dispatching up to 25 trucks carrying food and humanitarian supplies through the Rafah crossing at the Egyptian border.
But alarm bells began ringing when updates on how the money was being distributed did not arrive – with a whistleblower telling the MoS that insufficient ‘due diligence’ checks had been carried out.
Minutes of an emergency meeting held on April 4, 2024, leaked to this newspaper, warn that the funds could have fallen into the hands of ‘Hamas and other terror-related entities operating in Gaza’.