Coffee and cash: how Hamas pays its civil servants in secret

One of thousands of public servants in Gaza’s Hamas-run government, Karim, a public works ministry employee, received what seemed like an ordinary message on his phone: an invitation “for a coffee”.

The text gave a time for a meeting near a school sheltering displaced people amid the wreckage and rubble of nearly two years of war between Hamas and Israel in the Palestinian territory.

Karim, who like others interviewed by AFP asked to use a pseudonym, explained how he went to the meeting in…