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.

“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.

“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 settlements in occupied Palestine illegal, offering donations “with receipts” in France and Canada. An Israeli crowdfunding tech company, Israelgives, has also facilitated millions of dollars in funding for settlements from US residents .

The exterior of the new dormitory is already complete and the Israeli military has built an outpost on the roof of the Palestinian home nextdoor. In 2023, Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron donated £58,200 to the school and claimed more than £2,000 in gift aid from HMRC, according to its accounts. The charity says on its website that it is not registered for gift aid. In 2024, when it had lower turnover so did not file full accounts, it sent £21,360 to the school.

The donations from Friends of Yeshivat appear to contravene the charity’s own deed of trust, which refers to educational and charitable work “in the state of Israel”, with no mention of Palestine .

Although Israel has never defined its own borders, the British government last year formally recognised the state of Palestine, on territory which includes Hebron.

The charity was one of 32 registered in England and Wales identified in a letter sent to the commission by the Labour MP Melanie Ward on 1 June in which she said they had in total donated at least £28m 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 investigation is under way.

On 9 June, the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said in parliament that “charity systems are abused to funnel support to illegal settlements” and that “some evidence suggests that rules are being broken”. She said the Charity Commission had been tasked with investigating links to settlements.

The commission said in a statement that it shared Ward’s concerns. It added: “But 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 & Shaw. Solomon Taylor & Shaw’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 Guardian contacted Solomon Taylor & Shaw and Bloom for comment.

Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron was also approached for comment.

The current yeshiva building and the expansion are both 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 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.

“If communities fund that [new] dormitory, they are funding more violence, funding the next wave that will bring death to Palestinian families and Israeli families,” Weiman said. “Everything that happens in Hebron first, happens elsewhere afterwards.”

Labour peer Helena Kennedy called for British citizens to be banned from buying property in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Speaking in the House of Lords on Monday, Kennedy said the purchase or investment in settlement land would make British citizens “complicit” in violations of international law.

“We cannot have British citizens being complicit in violations of international law,” she said, adding that continued settlement expansion was making it “impossible for the Palestinians ever to have a state of their own”.

Kennedy, director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, urged ministers to “match words with actions” by preventing British involvement in settlement property.