An MP has asked the Charity Commission to investigate 32 charities in England and Wales after alleging they donated at least £28m to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Melanie Ward also wants the regulator to remove the organisations from the charity register, saying the money may have helped sustain activity she argues is not charitable.
The complaint landed on Tuesday, the same day foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said the Charity Commission had been tasked with investigating UK charities' links to settlements. That gave fresh urgency to a fight that has been building for months and has already drawn in one of the better known UK-linked intermediaries handling donations for Israeli causes.
Ward, who was formerly chief executive of Medical Aid for Palestinians, said that if gift aid had been claimed in the usual way, taxpayers could have subsidised the donations to the tune of £5.6m. In her letter to the regulator, she named the Kasner Charitable Trust and UK Toremet among the charities under scrutiny and said researchers had examined documents in English and Hebrew to trace the flows.
The details she highlighted are not small. Last year, the Kasner Charitable Trust and UK Toremet were revealed to have donated about £5.7m to the Bnei Akiva Yeshiva high school in Susya, and Ward said Kasner had also given to a yeshiva in Hebron. She also pointed to a £38,479 donation by UK Toremet in 2022 to Regavim, a group described as extremist and pro-settler, with the European Union imposing sanctions on it. Through the Jgive platform, for which UK Toremet processes UK currency donations, people can also give to Regavim and other pro-settler groups.
Ward said the issue goes far beyond a dispute over one charity's bookkeeping. She said supporting settlements in Palestinian territory is not a charitable purpose and argued the money may be tied to breaches of international law, pointing to scrutiny from the United Nations, successive UK governments, the International Court of Justice and an International Criminal Court investigation on war crimes grounds. She said, in words that captured her case, that any activity supporting the maintenance and expansion of settlements is extremist and not in the UK public interest, and that it risks being materially and financially used in pursuit of breaches of international law.
UK Toremet pushed back, saying the Charity Commission had already found it to be compliant with the law. It said it only processes Jgive payments after due diligence and when they are for projects that meet charitable purposes, and said the donation to Regavim was for a project within Israel's pre-1967 borders. It also said Shivat Zion Lerigvy Admata was not an approved recipient under its grant-making framework and that Regavim is no longer an approved recipient. Kasner previously said its donations were for educational purposes and had been cleared by the commission.
For Palestinians living under the settlements, the complaint is not abstract. Yaser Alkam, who said settlers attacked him last year while he was trying to harvest his olives, said donations to outposts and settlements directly affect Palestinians who own land in those areas. With the Charity Commission now formally tasked to look into UK charities' links to settlements, the immediate question is which of the 32 organisations it will examine first — and whether any will be removed from the register.
