British taxpayers funded “therapeutic healing” for Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza, Declassified can reveal.
An Israeli organisation received the undisclosed sum via a UK charity, with 25% Gift Aid added on by the British government.
Emails obtained by Delcassified show how the Yahalom Foundation – an Israeli veterans group – tells British supporters to channel their donations via its “registered partner platform in the UK”.
“Processing your donation through them ensures you receive full tax recognition and enabled Gift Aid, maximising the impact of your contribution,” it says.
“100% of your gift is routed directly to Yahalom to support our core mission.”
The Yahalom Foundation directs British supporters to a list of fundraising projects for Israel Defence Forces (IDF) veterans, claiming that donations would be eligible for the tax subsidy.
The list includes funding a £5,000 “therapeutic healing journey” for soldiers returning from Gaza, as well as “individual psychological treatments”.
The foundation is also raising money for a £100,000 memorial hall to commemorate fallen Israeli soldiers.
Additional records from two years ago show that British donations were made to fund equipment for serving Israeli soldiers – although it is not clear whether Gift Aid was added to these.
A fundraising page said: “With your help we can buy more specialized equipment and supply it to our soldiers.”
The Charity Commission has previously warned: “It is not lawful, or acceptable, for a charity to raise funds to support a soldier of a foreign military.”
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‘Family of warriors’
Trained in explosives and “destroying terror tunnels”, Yahalom is the IDF’s elite engineering unit. It has had a key role in the Gaza genocide, with the destruction of civilian infrastructure.
“The Yahalom Unit is deployed everywhere in the Gaza Strip,” an IDF spokesperson has said, while one of the unit’s soldiers has spoken publicly about blowing up buildings in Gaza and operating in Palestinian hospitals.
Troops and veterans of the unit are supported by the Yahalom Foundation, which aims to be an “anchor” for Yahalom’s “family of warriors”.
As a foreign organisation, the Yahalom Foundation cannot directly benefit from UK Gift Aid.
But emails from the foundation’s Head of Fundraising suggest that a British charity called UK Toremet acts as a conduit for Gift Aid donations.
“UK Toremet is our registered partner platform in the UK that processes donations on our behalf,” the email said.
“Because UK Toremet is a registered UK charity, processing your donation through them ensures you receive full tax recognition and enabled Gift Aid, maximising the impact of your contribution.”
PTSD
Responding to Declassified’s investigation, UK Toremet confirmed it had given money to the Yahalom Foundation for “the provision of PTSD treatment to the association’s beneficiaries”.
It claimed: “UK Toremet’s monitoring of its grant to the Yahalom Foundation has confirmed that the funds were applied exclusively to the restricted purpose for which they were given.”
Toremet’s spokesman added: “The provision of mental-health treatment to an individual is welfare and medical relief, charitable under English law.”
The charity also denied being Yahalom Foundation’s “partner platform”, saying this description was “not accurate”. The trustees said they would “follow up with the Yahalom Foundation regarding its wording”.
A statement from UK Toremet added: “A donor may recommend a cause of their choosing; the trustees then assess, thoroughly but solely, whether a grant to that cause would be compliant with English charity and tax law.”
But the charity’s claims are at odds with those of the Yahalom Foundation, who say that “100%” of donations are “routed directly to Yahalom” to support its core mission.
And while UK Toremet claimed that Yahalom Foundation is merely an “alumni association” for IDF veterans, the foundation’s own website says it is dedicated to soldiers “who have served and are currently serving”.
Our findings follow the Charity Commission announcement last week that it had launched an inquiry into eight British charities working in illegal Israeli settlements. The regulator said it would examine whether funds are being used to further charitable purposes.
When questioned by Declassified, UK Toremet refused to confirm whether it is among those being investigated.
However, a spokesperson for the regulator said the inquiry followed “serious allegations” about “operating in illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine”.
“All charities must be able to demonstrate that they are delivering on their charitable purposes, wherever in the world they operate and whatever they do,” they added.
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UK Toremet
Declassified’s findings mark the latest in a string of controversies surrounding UK Toremet.
The charity was founded by Jonny Cline, a Briton who emigrated to Israel where he reportedly stood as a candidate for Jewish Home, which the BBC has called a “far-right” party, and was a spokesman for an illegal West Bank settlement.
In June, Labour MP Melanie Ward spoke out about UK Toremet, saying it was one of two British groups that had donated a combined £28m to illegal Israeli settlements.
Ward said that, if gift aid were claimed against the donations, it would mean British taxpayers had added £5.6m to the funding.
Her intervention followed Declassified’s investigation earlier this year which revealed how another Israeli charity, Shivat Zion, had invited supporters to claim UK Gift Aid when making donations, saying the money would “go through” UK Toremet.
Our undercover investigation revealed how Shivat Zion offered to help British citizens move to an illegal settlement in the West Bank, describing it as “awesome”.
Last year, the Guardian also alleged that UK Toremet had acted as a conduit for another charity, transferring approximately £5.7m to a high school in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
The Guardian said this had been done with the “endorsement” of the Charity Commission, who described the funding as “legitimate”.
More recently, an Al Jazeera documentary investigating UK complicity in settler violence drew links between UK Toremet and Regavim, an extremist pro-settler group that has been sanctioned by the EU for supporting the destruction of Palestinian homes.
In the documentary, Regavim’s international director, Naomi Linder Kahn, is secretly filmed saying: “We work through UK Toremet”.
Kahn explains: “UK Toremet donates to an Israeli charity called – it’s a sister organisation – called Giving. And Giving donated directly to us. That way, it doesn’t appear anywhere on the records of your family, or individuals, or organisations, or even UK Toremet, that they have donated to Regavim.”
She added: “There’s no paper trail… There’s no actual connection between Regavim and any UK charity.”
The documentary also linked UK Toremet to Ateret Cohanim, an Israeli organisation that buys “ideological real estate” for illegal settlers.
Its director, Daniel Luria, is filmed admitting that the group subsidises guns. “This is all about Jewish sovereignty,” he says.
In a subsequent email, Luria claimed that UK Toremet had previously been used to “successfully transfer funds to us from the UK”, adding: “It was sent to our ‘sister’ non profit org under our auspices.”
Meanwhile, UK Toremet has insisted that it operates fully within UK charity law. “UK Toremet’s grant-making, due-diligence and monitoring policies were developed with specialist legal advisers,” it told Declassified.
But since 2016, the Charity Commission has undertaken three separate regulatory compliance cases about UK Toremet’s work in Palestine. The charity’s trustees were also issued with statutory guidance and an action plan, which warned it must comply with the Geneva Conventions Act 1957.
A spokesperson said the Charity Commission has also “communicated to the trustees the Government’s position that construction of settlements in Palestine is illegal under international law”.
Reacting to our investigation into the Yahalom Foundation, Gearóid Ó Cuinn, director of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), told Declassified that this appeared to be “another instance of the UK failing to abide by clear obligations under international law to stamp out financial links to international abuses.
“The UK is not only dragging its feet on the ban on illegal settlement goods imports, but now there is serious concern that public gift aid funds could be used to support Israeli soldiers who have been committing genocide in Gaza and war crimes in the West Bank.”
When questioned by Declassified, a spokesperson for HMRC, which is responsible for Gift Aid, declined to comment, saying that confidentiality rules prevented them from discussing the tax affairs of charities.
The Yahalom Foundation did not respond to Declassified’s request for comment.
