UK Charity Funds Illegal Hebron Settlement Expansion

Published: 07 July 2026. The English Chronicle Desk. The English Chronicle Online.

A British charity is currently funding a religious school located at the heart of expansion plans for an illegal Israeli settlement within the Palestinian city of Hebron. Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron sent nearly two hundred thousand pounds to the school between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty-four. These figures appear in the latest accounts publicly available on the website of the Charity Commission, the official regulator for England and Wales. Construction of a new dormitory for the religious school was approved this past June. The far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, unilaterally broke a decades-old international agreement on the control of Hebron. This move effectively granted Israel planning authority over this deeply contested and highly sensitive historic urban area. The expansion will certainly increase the population of one of the most extreme Israeli communities in the occupied West Bank. It remains the only settlement built directly in the heart of a densely populated Palestinian city.

Issa Amro is a well-known Palestinian human rights defender who co-founded the group Youth Against Settlements in Hebron. He recently expressed his profound concern regarding the ongoing activities and the influx of foreign funding from abroad. He stated that the public wants British charities to fund peace rather than obstacles that block potential peace. He described the situation as deeply wrong and warned of the dangerous implications for the local Palestinian residents. According to Amro, the students attending this yeshiva are often very aggressive toward those living in the surrounding area. He explained that a new building will inevitably mean more violence directed toward Palestinians, alongside greater restrictions on movement. Furthermore, the expansion will likely necessitate an increased Israeli military presence to secure the area and protect the new facilities.

Israel has built extensive systems of militarised separation to isolate several hundred settlers inside the city from the people they displaced. Palestinians are now barred entirely from some historic streets, while walls and gates divide families who live in areas under Israeli military control. Those areas remain separated from most of the two hundred and thirty thousand Palestinian residents who still live in the wider city. Hagit Ofran, a representative from the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now, highlighted the devastating impact of these persistent settlement activities on the ground. She noted that for this yeshiva to exist, thousands of Palestinians have already lost their shops, their housing, and their daily livelihoods. She further argued that the new dormitory is a significant development because they are adding more settlers in Hebron. She characterized it as the most extreme settlement, noting that a system of apartheid is present everywhere in the city.

International and Israeli leaders, including the late American president Jimmy Carter, have said that Israel has imposed apartheid in the occupied West Bank. Former Mossad head Tamir Pardo and the former attorney general of Israel, Michael Ben-Yair, have also made similar public statements regarding this situation. The Hebron Yeshiva continues to seek funding in other countries that officially consider settlements in occupied Palestine to be completely illegal. They offer donations with receipts in countries such as France and Canada to encourage further financial support from abroad. An Israeli crowdfunding tech company known as Israelgives has also facilitated millions of dollars in funding for various settlements from residents in the United States.

The exterior of the new dormitory is already complete, and the Israeli military has built a new outpost on the roof of the Palestinian home next door. In twenty twenty-three, Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron donated over fifty-eight thousand pounds to the school. The charity even claimed more than two thousand pounds in gift aid from the government agency HMRC, according to its own financial accounts. Interestingly, the charity claims on its own website that it is not actually registered to receive such gift aid. In twenty twenty-four, when it had a lower turnover, it did not file full accounts, but it still managed to send over twenty-one thousand pounds to the school. The donations from Friends of Yeshivat appear to contravene the charity’s own deed of trust, which explicitly refers to educational and charitable work in the state of Israel. Notably, there is absolutely no mention of any charitable work being conducted in Palestine within their official governing documents. Although Israel has never formally defined its own borders, the British government last year officially recognized the state of Palestine, on territory which includes the city of Hebron.

The charity was one of thirty-two registered in England and Wales identified in a letter sent to the commission by the Labour MP Melanie Ward on the first of June. In that letter, she argued that they had collectively donated at least twenty-eight million pounds to Israeli settlements in recent years. The Guardian understands that the Charity Commission passed on details of the letter to the Metropolitan police’s war crimes unit, but no formal investigation is currently under way. On the ninth of June, the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said in parliament that charity systems are clearly being abused to funnel support to illegal settlements. She added that some evidence suggests that established rules are being broken by these organizations. She stated that the Charity Commission had been tasked with investigating these specific links to the illegal settlements.

The commission said in a statement that it shared the concerns raised by the Member of Parliament. It added that this remains a complex and contentious issue, which touches on wider legal principles about charities’ right to operate and support the most vulnerable in parts of the world in which there may be conflict, contested jurisdiction, or lawlessness. Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron provides details of a UK account with Barclays Bank to which donors can transfer funds. A Barclays spokesperson said it could not comment on individual clients but that it does have policies and procedures in place to meet its legal and regulatory obligations, including appropriate due diligence and financial crime controls for charity clients. The charity’s contact email was the professional account of Ari Bloom, a trustee who is a partner at the law firm Solomon Taylor and Shaw. The firm’s switchboard number is listed as the charity’s phone contact, and it is registered to the same north London address used by the law firm. The contact details on the Charity Commission website were changed after the media contacted the law firm and the trustee for comment. The charity itself was also approached for comment.

The current yeshiva building and the expansion are both located at the edge of the Israeli-controlled area of Hebron. Nadav Weiman, the executive director of Breaking the Silence, a group founded by Israeli combat veterans to document military abuses in occupied Palestine, said students often throw stones at Palestinians from their roof. Israeli soldiers, who outnumber the settlers, have turned the rooftops of private Palestinian homes into military posts to guard the yeshiva complex. Weiman stated that if communities fund that new dormitory, they are funding more violence and the next wave of events that will bring death to both Palestinian families and Israeli families. He warned that everything that happens in Hebron first, often happens elsewhere afterwards. Labour peer Helena Kennedy has called for British citizens to be banned from buying property in these illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Speaking in the House of Lords, Kennedy said that the purchase or investment in settlement land would make British citizens complicit in violations of international law. She argued that the country cannot have British citizens being complicit in clear violations of international law, adding that continued settlement expansion was making it impossible for the Palestinians ever to have a state of their own. Kennedy, who serves as the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, urged ministers to match their words with concrete actions by effectively preventing further British involvement in these settlement properties.

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