Golan calls for probe of Netanyahu’s bank accounts amid Qatargate scandal

By Sam Sokol 20 August 2025, 10:28 am

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Sam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

Leader of the Democrats party Yair Golan at a faction meeting at the Knesset on July 7, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The Democrats chairman Yair Golan calls for checking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bank accounts to ensure that he has not been accepting Qatari money in light of senior aides’ financial ties to the Arab state.

“I ask myself a very, very simple thing. The security establishment has warned — and there is plenty of evidence for this — that Qatari money is being used to build Hamas’s power,” Golan tells the Kan public broadcaster.

“As I understand it, based on media reports, these Shin Bet reports were passed on to the prime minister, and despite that he continued to transfer the Qatari money. And I ask, in light of his willingness to be very generous to the Qataris and in light of the generosity he feels towards his closest aides and their ties to Qatar… whether it would be unreasonable to check if the prime minister himself, his bank account hasn’t been padded with Qatari money.”

Under Netanyahu, Israel allowed suitcases with millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through Israeli crossings between 2018 and 2023, to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.

Hebrew media reported in March that Netanyahu was warned at least twice before the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, that the terror group’s military chief Muhammad Deif was appropriating funds provided by Qatar to Gaza.

According to near-identical reports by Channel 12 and the Kan public broadcaster, Netanyahu was warned in 2019 by then-Shin Bet chief Nadav Argaman and again in 2020 by the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate.

Several of Netanyahu’s top aides are currently under investigation over alleged financial ties with Qatar. Netanyahu is not a suspect.

Netanyahu filed a defamation suit against Golan in April over messages he sent to supporters accusing the premier of peddling the country’s security for money in the so-called Qatargate scandal.