UK charity funding school at heart of illegal Israeli settlement expansion

A new IDF outpost on top of a Palestinian home, set up in recent weeks to guard the Yeshiva expansion. Photograph: Nadav Weiman/Breaking the Silence View image in fullscreen A new IDF outpost on top of a Palestinian home, set up in recent weeks to guard the Yeshiva expansion. Photograph: Nadav Weiman/Breaking the Silence UK charity funding school at heart of illegal Israeli settlement expansion Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron sent nearly £200,000 to school in Hebron – where Israel has been accused of imposing apartheid – between 2019 and 2024 A British charity is funding a religious school at the heart of expansion plans for the illegal Israeli settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron. Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron sent nearly £200,000 to the school between 2019 and 2024, the last year for which accounts are publicly available on the website of the Charity Commission, the charity regulator for England and Wales. Construction of a new dormitory for the school was approved in June, after the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, unilaterally broke a decades-old international agreement on control of Hebron to give Israel planning authority. The expansion will increase the population of one of the most extreme Israeli communities in the occupied West Bank, and the only one built in the heart of a Palestinian city. My nine-year-old son Mohammad, killed by Israeli soldiers, is not just another number | Alia Abdel Majid Al-Hallaq Read more “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 Hebron and co-founder of Youth Against Settlements. “The students at this Yeshiva are very aggressive. A new building will mean more violence towards Palestinians, more restrictions, more Israeli military presence.” Israel has built extensive systems of militarised separation to isolate several hundred settlers inside Hebron from the city they moved into. Palestinians are barred entirely from some streets, and walls and gates divide Palestinians who live in areas under Israeli military control from most of the 230,000 population. View image in fullscreen Israeli settlers on a weekly tour in Hebron, escorted by security forces. Photograph: Mussa Qawasma/Reuters “For this yeshiva 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 new dormitory is a significant development because they are adding more settlers in Hebron, the most extreme settlement, where apartheid is everywhere.” International and Israeli leaders, including the late US president Jimmy Carter, the former Mossad head Tamir Pardo and former attorney general of Israel Michael Ben-Yair, have said Israel has imposed apartheid in the occupied West Bank , including Hebron. Hebron Yeshiva seeks funding in other countries that consider se