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Paramedics load an injured person into an ambulance after a fire at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright, outside of Wainwright, Alberta, on Oct. 17, 2026. —John Ulan—The Canadian Press via AP
Four service members died in a fire that broke out at one of Canada’s main military bases on Oct. 17, according to Prime Minister Mark Carney. Officials are continuing to assess the damage and an investigation is underway to determine the cause of the deadly blaze.
Carney made a statement at midday Sunday about what he described as a “violent, fast-moving fire” that occurred during a routine training exercise. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith later confirmed that 39 people had been killed with at least 19 in critical condition, saying that some were recovering from severe burns and would require long-term treatment.
“What followed was one of the worst tragedies for forces on Canadian soil in peacetime,” Carney said.
Canada Defense Minister David McGuinty similarly underscored the severity of the incident in a video statement on Oct. 17. “I cannot recall an incident like this,” he said, describing the event as “very active and delicate.”
On Sunday, the military said there is no indication that this was an act of terrorism. TIME has reached out to Canada’s Department of National Defence for more information.
Here’s what to know about the event as it unfolds.
What is known about the fire incident at CFB Wainwright
A fire “ignited” within the training area of Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Wainwright in the late afternoon on Oct. 17, according to a statement from the Canadian Armed Forces.
The flames eventually “spread rapidly due to high winds,” the district said in a Facebook post that evening. The fire extended beyond the base and toward the adjacent Municipal District of Wainwright.
In a subsequent update, the district said that the fire was being held. The Canadian Armed Forces said that additional details would be confirmed after next-of-kin have been notified.
McGuinty did not provide details about what might have started the blaze; however, he said that an investigation would be launched.
The Defense Minister is currently en route to Edmonton. He said he had spoken with Carney and Smith.
Carney had recently returned to Ottawa after a visit to Alberta, where he is from, as the province prepares to vote on Monday about whether they want to begin the legal process of potentially separating from Canada.
What is CFB Wainwright?
CFB Wainwright is one of the country’s “busiest” army bases, located over 100 miles southeast of the Alberta province capital Edmonton.
The base hosts the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre and the 3rd Canadian Division Training Centre, and it is the “preferred” training ground for army field force units based in Western Canada.
“Our country depends on the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces,” Carney said on Sunday, “and CFB Wainwright is where the women and men of our armed forces learn to do the hardest things this country can ask of anyone.”
Retired Major-General Denis Thompson spoke to CBC on Sunday about the training he had experienced at Wainwright, which included “large formations … bringing together infantry, foot soldiers, with artillery” in large-scale live-fire training that sometimes include air-dropped munitions.
“You're trying to put that together in order to conduct complex operations in as safe an environment as possible, but remember we're talking about live fire, here, to do things like breaching obstacles, which are extremely difficult,” Thompson said.
Wainwright Mayor Bruce Pugh told CBC on Sunday that, prior to the incident, he could hear cannon fire and weapons firing, though he noted that the sounds were not unusual for the training base. He said that the base went quiet and then the fire department was activated, and he realized then that something might have happened.
He also explained that weather conditions were a contributing factor. “October has been dry,” he observed, while acknowledging the impact of high winds.
The base employed around 1,300 military and civilian personnel, including roughly 1,070 military members, according to October 2025 figures published by the Town of Wainwright. Wainwright is home to over 6,600 people. That excludes personnel living on the base.
“We have neighbors who are either serving or former members of the Canadian Armed Forces. We’re integrated, our kids playing the same hockey teams, attend the same schools,” Pugh told CBC.
Hospitals declare ‘Code Orange’
According to CBC, Edmonton hospitals have called a code orange alert. The designation is reserved for an external disaster or mass casualty incident.
"This would be the largest mass casualty event that we have seen in this community," Push confirmed to CBC.
He went on to praise first responders working at the local hospital, which served as the initial triage point.
“Our local health care facility was the reception area for those casualties,” he said.
Of the first responders at the scene, Pugh said: “They were witness to things that you would pray that you never see, or that if you do, it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience of service.”
Alberta Health Services responded to a request from TIME on midday Sunday, saying: "We are working to gather additional information and will provide an update as soon as we can."
“Canadians come together in crisis,” Carney said on Sunday, commending the fast and coordinated response on the ground as the incident unfolded.
The Prime Minister Carney said he is expecting an official statement from leadership in Wainwright by Sunday afternoon.
This is a developing story and will continue to be updated.
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A gynecologist points to the head of a fetus in an ultrasound image. | Jan Woitas/picture alliance via Getty Images
We live in an era of endless optimization. Fitness trackers help us measure our lifespan, people are consuming piles of protein in an attempt to be their best selves, and there’s even an urge to maximize our morality. In a world of constant self-improvement, it’s no wonder that journey has reached our attempts at reproduction.
Kristen V. Brown is a journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Immortal Womb: The Centuries-Long Quest to Control the Female Body and Hack Human Reproduction. As the title suggests, she writes about all of the ways people are trying to exert more control over the process of having children.
“I think that what we’re seeing right now is that people will do anything they can to have the healthiest baby possible,” she told Vox. “So much is out of your control, and people are just trying to figure out, how do I get more control? How do I skew the odds in my favor?” She says that one way people try to get more agency is through a technology called PGT-P, or preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic risk.
“If you go through IVF, very often they’ll have you do a basic genetic screening that can detect things like Down syndrome. This screening takes that up a notch,” Brown said. “It uses that same preimplantation genetic testing to look for the likelihood of complex genetic conditions — stuff like heart disease, like diabetes — in order to, quote, ‘let people have the healthiest baby.’”
But what can potential parents do with that knowledge? How far can this technology go? And what are the ethics of using it in the first place? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Brown, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
What other things are they testing embryos for?
For conditions that are only impacted by one gene, like Huntington’s disease, it’s very easy to say, ‘Does this embryo have it or not?’ with a pretty good degree of confidence. But that’s not how this technology works. Something like heart disease, for example, is impacted by hundreds of genes. Also, something like heart disease is not only genetic. It’s affected by environment and lifestyle.
I think that what’s motivating most people is the health aspect. But a lot of these companies are marketing these tests, saying they can also look for height. They can look at eye color. Some of them are promising IQ. How do you even define intelligence, let alone how do you define the genetics of intelligence? Alzheimer’s disease, longevity, which embryo is going to live the longest life. So it’s already gone beyond disease into some of these more aesthetic concerns.
Do we know how many people are doing this?
I think it’s a very small number of people at this point. But I think that we’re seeing more and more companies in the space, and we’re seeing more and more support from fertility doctors.
I want to emphasize that most mainstream medical societies are against this. Most of the IVF doctors I know do not think this has value. Most people in the genetic space do not think this technology has value either for embryos or for adults, but I think we’re seeing support growing.
I think that a lot of people in the fertility space are already envisioning a future where this does become more mainstream because the idea is just so appealing, even if the technology has flaws.
What about embryo editing? Is that something we’re seeing? Can people go in and change things around?
Not right now. Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. How can you be sure enough that it’s safe? Because you won’t know for sure until an embryo grows up into an adult whether anything went awry.
Right now it is illegal, but there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better. Most of the support right now for embryo editing is for disease. The argument for it is that, let’s say you are a carrier for Huntington’s disease or you have Huntington’s disease. Right now, there is something that you can do. You can use polygenic screening to select the embryos that don’t have the disease, but in IVF, even if you don’t have a terrible disease hiding in your DNA, it’s hard to get a lot of embryos.
You have these situations where couples have to do rounds and rounds and rounds of IVF to get one or two embryos that aren’t carriers for a harmful variant, right? And so the argument for it is, let’s give these people a better shot.
But I imagine there are people out there who aren’t looking into editing simply for making children more resistant to diseases. They are looking at those things like eye color and height.
There’s actually a name for that. This tech executive called Brian Armstrong coined this term, the Gattaca stack, [named] after the movie. The vision is to use a suite of fertility technologies to make the perfect human.
The first thing they want to use is this technology called in vitro gametogenesis, which is where you take a skin cell and you turn it into an egg and a sperm, and then you make an embryo with it, so women don’t have to go through rounds of IVF.
The idea is that you can get tons and tons and tons of embryos, and then you can use PGT-P to then screen for the best ones, and then you can use an artificial womb to incubate and grow them.
This brings to mind a certain E word, and that word is eugenics. What are the ethics here?
Because on one hand, I can understand that there are parents who are like, “I just want to have a healthy baby. I want to bring a child into this world. I just want to put my best foot forward with this human that I’m going to bring to Earth.” And then on the other hand, it gets a little weird.
It gets weird fast. In some ways, we’ve already gone down that slippery slope. Right now, even if you don’t go through IVF, we screen against Down syndrome early in pregnancy. Down syndrome is a condition in which you have a disability, but you can live a full, happy, healthy life. For a long time, parents of kids with Down syndrome have argued that already selecting and screening against Down syndrome pregnancies is a form of [eugenics].
As technology gets more advanced, we see that same question applied to more and more conditions. I think that one of the things that we don’t talk about enough is that the genome is complicated. You can’t actually just go in there and be like, ‘I want a tall baby with blue eyes and a great laugh.’
I think that becoming a parent is an exercise in giving up control, and that’s easier for some people than others. I have so much sympathy and empathy for people who are trying to stack the deck. But I think there are just so many variables when it comes to human reproduction that we are never going to be able to fully control the process, as much as we might want to and as appealing as that might sound.
Editor’s note, October 18, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in September 2024.
This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.
I think I have a duty to help people much poorer than me, and I give 10 percent of my salary to charities that I think are effective at preventing early death due to poverty. I also live in a city with a lot of visible homelessness, and am often solicited for money. My brain says that this is not an effective way to help people; the people asking might not be the neediest among the homeless in my city, and the people I’m sending malaria bednets and pills to are even needier. At the same time, I feel callous simply ignoring all these requests. What should I do?
Dear Would-Be Optimizer,
Nine times out of ten, when someone’s got an ethical dilemma, I think it’s because a couple of their core values are conflicting with each other. But you’re that tenth case. I say that because I don’t actually believe your question represents a battle royale between two different values. I think there’s one core value here — helping people — and one strategy that’s masquerading as a value.
That strategy is optimization. I can tell from your phrasing that you’re really into it. You don’t just want to help people — you want to help people as effectively as possible. Since extreme poverty is concentrated in developing countries, and since your dollar goes much further there than it would in your home country, your optimizing impulse is telling you to send your charity money abroad.
Optimization started as a technique for solving certain math problems, but our society has elevated it to the status of a value — arguably one of the dominant values in the Western world. It’s been on the rise since the 1700s, when utilitarian thinkers seeded the idea that both economics and ethics should focus on maximizing utility (meaning, happiness or satisfaction): Just calculate how much utility each action would produce, and choose the one that produces the most.
You can see this logic everywhere in modern life — from work culture, with its emphasis on productivity hacks and agile workflows, to wellness culture, with its emphasis on achieving perfect health and optimal sleep. The mandate to “Live your best life!” is turbocharged by Silicon Valley, which urges us to quantify every aspect of ourselves with Fitbits, Apple Watches, and Oura Rings, because the more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you.
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Optimization definitely has its place, including in the world of charity. Some charitable organizations are much more effective than others trying to achieve the same goal. All things being equal, we don’t want to blow all our money on the wildly ineffective ones. Effective altruists, members of the utilitarian-flavored social movement that aims to do the most good possible, are fond of noting that the most effective charities out there actually produce 100 times more benefit than the average ones. Why not get the biggest bang for your buck?
The problem is that we’ve stretched optimization beyond its optimal limits. We try to apply it to everything. But not every domain in life can be optimized, at least not without compromising on some of our values.
In your case, you’re trying to optimize how much you help others, and you believe that means focusing on the neediest. But “neediest” according to what definition of needy? You could assume that financial need is the only type that counts, so you should focus first on lifting everyone out of extreme poverty, and only then help people in less dire straits. But are you sure that only the brute poverty level matters?
Consider an insight from the Jewish tradition. The ancient rabbis were exquisitely sensitive to the psychological needs of poor people, and they argued that these needs should also be taken into account. So they decreed that you shouldn’t only give poor people enough money to survive on — they need to have more than that so they themselves can give charity to others. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “On the face of it, the rule is absurd. Why give X enough money so that he can give to Y? Giving to Y directly is more logical and efficient. What the rabbis understood, however, is that giving is an essential part of human dignity.”
The rabbis also figured that those who used to be well-off but who fell into poverty might feel an especially acute sense of shame. So they suggested helping these people save face by offering them not just bare necessities, but also — when possible — some of the nicer things that graced their former lifestyles. In the Talmud, we hear about one rabbi who gave a newly poor person a fancy meal, and another who acted as the person’s servant for a day! Clearly, the ancient rabbis weren’t only aiming to alleviate poverty. They were also alleviating the shame that can accompany it.
The point is that there are many ways to help people and, because they’re so different, they don’t submit to direct comparison. Comparing poverty and shame is comparing apples to oranges; one can be measured in dollars, but the other can’t. Likewise, how can you ever hope to compare preventing malaria with alleviating depression? Saving lives versus improving them? Or saving the life of a kid versus saving the life of an adult?
Yet if you want to optimize, you need to be able to run an apples-to-apples comparison — to calculate how much good different things do in a single currency, so you can pick the best option. But because helping people isn’t reducible to one thing — it’s lots of incommensurable things, and how to rank them depends on each person’s subjective philosophical assumptions — trying to optimize in this domain will mean you have to artificially simplify the problem. You have to pretend there’s no such thing as oranges, only apples.
And when you try to do that, an unfortunate thing happens. You end up rushing past all the unhoused people in your city and, as you put it, you “feel callous simply ignoring all these requests.” Ignoring these human beings comes at a cost, not only to them, but to you. It has a damaging effect on your moral conscience, which feels moved to help but is being told not to.
Even some leaders in effective altruism and the adjacent rationalist community recognize this as a problem and advise people not to shut up that part of themselves. Rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example, says it’s okay to donate some money to causes that make us feel warm and fuzzy but that aren’t producing maximum utility. His advice is to “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately” — meaning, devote one pot of money to pet causes and another (much bigger) pot of money to the most cost-effective charities. You can, he says, get your warm fuzzies by volunteering at a soup kitchen and “let that be validated by your other efforts to purchase utilons.”
I would also suggest diversifying your giving portfolio, but it’s not because I think you need to “validate” the warm fuzzies. Instead, it’s because of another value: integrity.
When 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams talked about integrity, he meant it in the literal sense of the word, which has to do with a person’s wholeness (think of related words like “integration”). He argued that moral agency does not sit in a contextless vacuum — it is always some specific person’s agency, and as specific people we have specific commitments.
For example, a mother has a commitment to ensuring her kid’s well-being, over and above her general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says she has to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for her own kid — but Williams says that’s an absurd demand. It alienates her from a core part of herself, ripping her into pieces, wrecking her wholeness — her integrity.
It sounds like that’s what you’re feeling when you pass a person experiencing homelessness and ignore them. Ignoring them makes you feel bad because it alienates you from the part of you that is moved by this person’s suffering — that sees the orangebut is being told there are only apples. That core part of you is no less valuable than the optimizing part, which you liken to your “brain.” It’s not dumber or more irrational. It’s the part that cares deeply about helping people, and without it, the optimizing part would have nothing to optimize!
So rather than trying to override it, I would encourage you to honor your wish to help in all its fullness. You won’t be able to run a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but that’s okay. Different types of help are useful in their own way and you can divvy up your budget between them, even though there’s no perfect formula to spit out the “optimal” allocations.
Diversifying your giving portfolio might look something like this. You keep a small amount of cash or gift cards on you, which you hand out to unhoused people you encounter directly. You put aside a larger amount to donate to a local or national charity with a strong track record. And you devote another amount to a highly effective charity abroad.
You might feel annoyed that there’s no universal mathematical formula that can tell you the best thing to do. If so, I get it. I want the magic formula too! But I know that desire is distinct from the core value here. Don’t let optimization eat the real value you hold dear.
Bonus: What I’m reading
I recently read Optimal Illusions, a book by mathematician Coco Krumme that traces the roots of optimization’s overreach. As she puts it, “Over the past century, optimization has made an impressive epistemic land grab.”
When torn between competing moral theories, does it make sense to diversify your donations in proportion to how much you believe in each theory? Some philosophers argue against that view, but Michael Plant and coauthors defend it in this new paper.
This gorgeously written essay by anthropologist Manvir Singh introduced me to the term “cooperating without looking” (or, because it’s a New Yorker essay, “coöperating without looking”). This “tendency to willfully ignore costs and benefits when helping others” — to help without calculating what you’ll gain from the altruistic act — is “a key feature of both romantic love and principled behavior.” When we help this way, people trust us more.
As Israeli voters prepare for elections on Oct. 27, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to defend and distance himself from one of his government’s most controversial policies: allowing Qatar to funnel nearly $2 billioninto the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for more than a decade. Previously undisclosed documents obtained by TIME, including letters from senior Israeli security officials to Qatari leaders, reveal that Israel encouraged and played a direct role in a payment program that was more extensive than Netanyahu has publicly acknowledged.
Beginning in 2012, Netanyahu’s government helped to facilitate Qatari payments to Gaza that had begun after Hamas seized control in 2007. By 2018, Qatar had sent roughly $1.1 billion into the Strip, according to an analysis provided to Israeli ministers, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported, with thefunding designated for humanitarian assistance, fuel, and government salaries. That year, after Israeli officials castigated Qatar for allegedly financing Hamas, the Qataris began demanding formal documentation of an arrangement the two governments had agreed was meant to provide relief to citizens of the beleaguered enclave.
The extent of Israel’s cooperation with the payments was reflected in a 2020 letter from Yossi Cohen, then director of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, to Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. “It is indeed a great opportunity to express our gratitude and appreciation for the humanitarian aid efforts that the State of Qatar has provided the last few years to the Gaza Strip,” Cohen wrote. “Undoubtedly, these humanitarian efforts have played a crucial role in improving the humanitarian situation within the Gaza Strip, and ensuring stability and safety in the region.”
Cohen's 2020 letter
The payment arrangement had the support of successive Israeli governments, the Palestinians, the Trump and Biden Administrations, the United Nations, and European powers, according to officials who served in both the Trump and Biden Administrations. The flow of money from Qatar into Gaza has taken on new significance since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed southern Israel, murdered some 1,200 people, and took 251 more hostage. The worst security failure in the country’s history raised troubling questions about whether the financial lifeline helped to sustain Hamas’s grip on power and, in turn, enabled it to carry out the assault.
Since then, Qatar has been frustrated by allegations leveled by Israeli political leaders that its payments to Gaza had helped finance the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.“All of Qatar’s financial assistance in Gaza has been directed to Palestinian citizens through mechanisms coordinated with the Israeli authorities and international partners. Under previous aid mechanisms, all financial assistance, as well as goods such as food, medicine and fuel, passed through Israel before entering Gaza,” a spokesperson for Qatar’s International Media Office tells TIME. “Nothing was delivered directly by Qatar; we provided the aid, while delivery was carried out by the United Nations’ organizations in coordination with the Israeli authorities. If any funding reached Hamas, as alleged by individuals and groups with political agendas against Qatar, the responsibility lies with Israel, which oversaw the delivery and created the mechanism.”
Critics have long argued that Netanyahu sought to sustain Hamas rule in Gaza to keep the Palestinians divided between the Islamist terror group and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, foreclosing the prospect of a unified Palestinian leadership capable of negotiating a two-state solution. Netanyahu’s wager, according to these critics, was that the aid would give Hamas something to lose and would therefore help contain the group while Israel pursued normalization with the Arab world without resolving the Palestinian question. Instead, as Israel moved closer to a historic agreement with Saudi Arabia, Hamas launched an assault that upended the region, plunging it into war.
The Prime Minister’s office declined to comment for this story.
The documents now give Israelis a fuller accounting of a policy that preceded the catastrophe, as they prepare to render a verdict on the man who presided over both. “It was a policy failure on our part born of good intentions that multiple prime ministers kept going,” says one former Israeli defense official. “But Netanyahu was unquestionably at the center of it. He was the one who championed and accelerated the program, his government was in charge of the way it was run, and now we know as a society that we can never afford to make a mistake like that again.”
Ehud Olmert was still prime minister when Qatar began sending money to Gaza in 2007, after Hamas won control of the coastal enclave. At the outset, the Israeli government was not directly involved in the transfers. That changed under Netanyahu. By 2012, his government had approved a system that gave Israel a direct role in facilitating Qatari assistance: delivering food and medical supplies, determining which Palestinian families qualified for financial aid and disbursing the funds, and enabling Qatari financing to expand Gaza’s electricity supply, according to Israeli and Arab officials, as well as official documents obtained by TIME.
At first, the arrangement was informal. Qatar supplied the money with Israel’s approval, even as Israeli officials publicly criticized Doha for financing Hamas, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. The contradiction aggravated the Qataris, a senior official in the first Trump Administration tells TIME: Israeli officials would denounce the payments in public, then privately ask Doha to renew them.
Qatar, a gas-rich monarchy in the Persian Gulf, is accustomed to walking a fine line. It plays host to both the U.S. Central Command and to senior Hamas officials. The country set up a Hamas political office in Doha at the request of the U.S. in 2011. In contrast to other Gulf monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar sees no threat in the Muslim Brotherhood, the political movement that spawned Hamas. After Oct. 7, Qatar's government emerged as the go-between in negotiations among Israel, Hamas and Washington, where Biden Administration officials privately praised the Qataris as honest brokers.
By 2018, Qatar sought written documentation of the Israeli government’s role in the aid agreement. It was subsequently formalized through a trilateral mechanism involving Qatar, Israel, and the United Nations, designed to administer the aid with international and Israeli oversight. On October 2, 2018, Israel and Qatar, together with the United Nations, signed an agreement to finance fuel deliveries into Gaza.
UN budget documents outlining the payment arrangments
A spokesperson for the United Nations declined to comment for this story but referred TIME to statements the body’s special coordinator for Middle East peace, Tor Wennesland, made in 2021 acknowledging the arrangement. “These efforts are vital to improving the dire socioeconomic and humanitarian situation in Gaza,” he said at a UN Security Council briefing.
In August 2021, Qatar signed another agreement committing $40 million to a cash assistance program that would give nearly 100,000 Palestinian households $100 per month for four months. The arrangements were subsequently extended. American officials were brought into the discussions as well. According to a diplomat briefed on the process, who asked for anonymity to divulge details because they were not authorized to comment publicly, Qatar wanted Washington to understand precisely how the system worked, fearing that Israeli officials might later accuse Doha of financing Hamas without acknowledging Israel’s own role. “The Israelis kept insisting on doing it this way, so that they can control what goes in and out,” the official told TIME, rather than establish “something more regular and something which goes directly to the people.”
Under the system, according to U.S. and Israeli officials, Qatar paid for fuel and electricity purchased from Israel to increase the number of hours Gaza received power, a structure coordinated with Israeli security services. It transferred money through the United Nations for projects in the Strip. And it provided monthly $100 payments to some of Gaza’s poorest families. According to diplomats familiar with the system, Israel vetted the recipients and oversaw the distribution mechanism, with funds transferred through the World Food Programme and eligible families notified by text message before collecting their assistance at designated locations. “If the money ever got in the wrong hands, it was because of the Israelis,” the diplomat said, “because they were the ones overseeing the whole thing.”
Netanyahu’s government was so committed to the policy that when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cut payments to government workers in Gaza in 2018, Israeli security officials shuttledQatari cash into the Strip in suitcases, U.S. and Israeli media reported at the time. Naftali Bennett, then Netanyahu’s education minister, publicly opposed the transfers, denouncing them as “protection money.” Netanyahu briefly suspended the payments in January 2019 amid renewed violence along the Gaza border, using the prospect of their resumption as leverage to pressure Hamas to stop firing rockets.
But while critics on the Israeli right railed against the deal, Netanyahu’s deputies worked behind the scenes to preserve it, according to correspondence obtained by TIME. In July 2019, according to one letter, Qatar notified the Netanyahu government that it was transferring $6 million to 20,000 beneficiaries in Gaza, with each receiving $300. It is unknown how many of those beneficiaries, chosen by Israel, were connected to Hamas or had family members who belonged to the group. Over the last two decades, Hamas has been deeply embedded in Gaza, operating not only as an armed militant organization but also as a political movement and governing authority, employing civil servants responsible for the territory’s public services and infrastructure.
In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through Gaza, R. L. Maoz, a member of Netanyahu’s National Security Council, urged Qatari officials to maintain the payments despite the Israeli government’s public criticism. “We reiterate the importance of continuing to transfer the Qatari humanitarian financial assistance through the existing mechanism,” Maoz wrote. “We ask that Qatar’s financial assistance not be transferred through mediators or countries other than the ambassador, Mohammed Al-Emadi,” he added, referring to the chairman of the Qatari Committee for the Reconstruction of Gaza. “We greatly appreciate your cooperation and open discourse to safeguard stability and security in the region and to bring our countries and peoples closer together.”
The program survived Netanyahu’s departure from power. His successor, Bennett, had been among its fiercest critics, raising the prospect that the arrangement might finally end. At that point, Qatar prepared to halt the program, a former Biden official tells TIME. Instead, after taking office in 2021, Bennett ended only the delivery of cash-filled suitcases, not the broader flow of Qatari assistance to Gaza, the Associated Press reported. According to people familiar with discussions about the policy, Bennett’s prior objections were a message intended for his domestic political constituency. “There’s no issue,” an Israeli representative told a Biden envoy, according to an official present. “We want to continue with it as is.”
To some of the officials involved, the compact contained a fundamental flaw: both the Israeli government and Hamas retained control over aid intended for ordinary Gazans. “Bibi and Hamas hold the tap, essentially,” one of the officials told me. Hamas could restrict the system to exert pressure internally, the official said, while Netanyahu could restrict it to pressure Hamas. “We knew this was not something that was beneficial for the long term. We need to have something that’s sustainable, that empowers the civilians.”
By 2023, with tensions mounting between Israel and Hamas, Qatari officials pressed for a different model, one that would deliver assistance to Gazans without making civilians dependent on either Hamas or the Israeli government. But Netanyahu’s government wanted the existing framework kept intact, according to multiple sources who spoke to TIME, including an Israeli official and an international diplomat.
Two weeks before October 7, Mossad director David Barnea traveled to Doha and asked Qatar to renew the funding, the New York Timesreported in 2023. The Qatari officials agreed but warned Barnea that it would be the last renewal. With tensions rising between Israel’s far-right ministers and Hamas, the arrangement had run its course, Qatar believed. Barnea asked for two more months. The rationale, according to the officials familiar with the conversation, was that continuing assistance to Gaza’s civilians gave Hamas something to lose and therefore gave Israel a measure of leverage over the group. After two months, the parties could reassess Hamas’s behavior and devise a more durable mechanism for delivering aid.
They never got the chance. With the brutal Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, the Qatari aid arrangement that successive Israeli governments had spent years helping to build, modify, and preserve was over.
Ever since, Netanyahu has faced accusations that he deliberately strengthened Hamas to keep the Palestinians divided—between Hamas in Gaza, and the secular Fatah party that under Abbas governs the West Bank—and forestall a peace agreement. Critics point to remarks Netanyahu allegedly made at a 2019 Likud Party meeting. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he said, accordingto a report in the Jerusalem Post. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza.”
In a 2024 interview with TIME, Netanyahu denied making the statement, insisting that the payments were meant to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. “The reason that successive governments agreed to that is that we wanted to make sure that Gaza has a functioning civilian administration to avoid humanitarian collapse,” he said. Without the money to maintain sewage systems, water supplies, and schools, he argued, the territory could have descended into chaos and disease. Netanyahu claims that Iran supplied Hamas with weapons through separate channels, including suspected smuggling routes across Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
Netanyahu’s dealings with Qatar have also become a source of controversy in Israel. Netanyahu has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks over the so-called Qatargate scandal, in which former and current aides to the Israeli premier allegedly received payments to conduct a public relations campaign to cast Qatar in a favorable light for more than a year after the Oct. 7 onslaught.
Now, as international diplomats contemplate Gaza’s reconstruction, they face a version of the same dilemma: how to provide essential assistance without strengthening Hamas or another militant organization. Trump Administration officials, led by envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, are working with Qatar and other Arab governments on a framework that would restore basic services while eliminating Gaza’s dependence on Islamist armed factions. “We want to ensure that the civilians are reliant on themselves and not on anyone else,” an international diplomat tells TIME. “So it’s providing actual opportunities for civilians to make money and be sustainable.”
The question confronting Israel and its international partners is not simply whether money should flow into Gaza, but also who controls it—and whether the next arrangement will avoid the failures of the last.
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