Israel moves to shutter West Bank school

updated 9:25 p.m. ET April 30, 2008

HEBRON, West Bank - To Nayfa Shatat, the widowed mother of 11, Hebron's biggest Islamic charity is a lifeline: It schools her daughters and helps feed her family.

To Israel, the Islamic Charitable Association is a front for the Islamic militant group Hamas, promoting the movement's violent ideology in its schools and funding extremist activity against Israel.

Early Wednesday, Israeli soldiers raided a sewing workshop run by the association, seizing sewing machines and bolts of cloth, witnesses said. The army said the workshop was used to raise money for militants.

While the association denies any links with Hamas, the military says it plans to close all the charity's operations, which include a boarding school for 600 disadvantaged children, several day schools and a bakery.

It's part of an intensified crackdown on Hamas by Israel and the West Bank government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas' forces last June, and neither Israel nor Abbas want to see a repeat in the West Bank.

In recent months, Israeli troops and Abbas' security forces have gone after West Bank charities, moneychangers, women's cooperatives and media outlets with suspected ties to the militants.

However, closing the Hebron association is more delicate because it serves thousands of children.

'Hamas is hemorrhaging'
A closure would deny services to the poor at a time when Abbas' government is not always able to pay for an alternative. Hamas has built a network of schools, clinics and welfare offices over two decades, deepening its roots in Palestinian society as a key provider of social services.

The closure might hamper Hamas' ability to deliver services, but would also taint Abbas, political scientist Salah Abdel Jawad said.

"Israel is weakening Palestinian society. It's harming the most vulnerable group of Palestinians," he said. "Hamas is hemorrhaging (popularity), but Israel isn't strengthening Mahmoud Abbas this way."

The association's lawyer, Abdel Karim Farah, has appealed the military's closure order, but the Israeli Supreme Court hasn't set a hearing date. Officials in the Abbas government said they were also trying to block the closure, but did not provide details.

Shatat, the widow, said she would be lost without the charity. "I can't provide for my children the way the association does," said Shatat, who lost her husband to cancer two years ago.

Two of her daughters, ages 9 and 10, attend the charity's boarding school, which largely caters to children from single-parent families, mostly widows. Four other children attend a public school, but rely on the charity for food aid and school supplies. Her other five children are no longer in school.

Other than the handouts, the family scrapes by on about $200 a month earned by her oldest son.

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