By Marika Sboros, JNS
Questions about the charity’s founder and its work in Gaza are troubling to Israel advocates.
Americans have generous hearts when asked for donations to global humanitarian causes, but they may want to think twice when it comes to the South African-based NGO, Gift of the Givers Foundation and its founder, Dr. Imtiaz Sooliman.
Billing itself as “the largest disaster response non-governmental organization of African origin on the African continent,” focused on helping with “disaster response, hunger alleviation, water provision, health care” and more, the organization has given out hundreds of millions of dollars. It is currently running fundraising “appeals” on its website to help with flooding in Somalia and “Gaza airstrikes.”
Pro-Israel activists are raising questions about the Gift of the Givers. Among them: Who are Gift of the Givers’s funders? Where do the millions of dollars the charity raises internationally go? Why won’t Sooliman publish annual financial statements as all international charities in South Africa routinely do?
Critics are also asking if the charity is just another cog in the wheel of Iran’s “slow-boil” international strategy to destroy Israel through its use of proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all of which are proscribed as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the United States and other countries.
Direct links between Gift of the Givers and terror funding are lacking, though some compelling circumstantial evidence exists.
Anti-Israel hobbyists habitually dismiss circumstantial evidence when it conflicts with their agenda. However, legal experts say that sufficient circumstantial evidence, presented correctly, can secure conviction in civil and criminal cases.
Sooliman consistently denies wrongdoing. He dismisses claims against him as “Zionist” propaganda. He has called Israel “baby killers, murderers of innocent civilians, journalists, health care and humanitarian-aid workers.” He spreads antisemitic tropes, including that Jews control the world and money.
While he refuses to provide proof of where his funds go, Sooliman demands that his critics either provide “irrefutable proof” funds are going to terror groups to relevant authorities or shut up. Those authorities include Standard Chartered Bank in the United States, through which Gift of the Givers does foreign-currency transactions.
The problem for Sooliman is the different faces he shows.
Foremost is his humanitarian face. Aiding him is the influential South African Helen Suzman Foundation, which promotes constitutional democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Suzman was a prominent South African Jewish anti-apartheid activist and politician. She was also a staunch supporter of the State of Israel.
The Suzman Foundation invited Sooliman to give its prestigious annual memorial lecture in Johannesburg on Nov. 14. That choice elicited a visceral reaction from many people, including Suzman’s family. The foundation did some soul-searching in response but not much.
In a statement two weeks earlier, on Oct. 27, foundation director Naseema Fakir and chairperson Kalim Rajab acknowledged “serious allegations” against Sooliman. They reiterated support for freedom of speech and said that the memorial lecture would go ahead “as planned.”
Yet objections to Sooliman were not based on his freedom of speech. Fakir and Rajab ignored elephants in the room, including Sooliman’s inflammatory rhetoric captured on video as the first anniversary of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, rolled around.
At a rally in Cape Town on Oct. 5, 2024, for example, he stood in front of the flags of Hamas, Hezbollah and PIJ leaders, Sooliman repeated antisemitic tropes about “Zionists” who “run the world with fear” and “control (it) with money.”
Then on Oct. 7, 2024 he looked on as protesters glorified the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel as “justified resistance,” saying, “We are all Hamas.”
His own comments on Oct. 7, 2024, were equally illuminating as he declared that “Allah himself has instructed me,” and said that he does not follow “international law or human law” only the law of the Koran that “overrides any other law.”
He has also said that he and his charity know “how to move cash.”
Despite his rejection of international law, Sooliman lobbied for and supported South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
In the past Sooliman has participated in hostage negotiations in the past, including in Yemen in 2015, earning him a reputation of being one who “gives food and frees hostages.” Yet, he maintains a deafening silence about the more than 90 Israeli hostages, including a baby and the elderly, who are still being captive in Gaza under conditions best described as hellish.
Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room regarding Sooliman’s work and his charity is the Gift of the Givers’s activities in Gaza. Being a “humanitarian” agency in Gaza means his organization was no doubt working with Hamas, which has been in charge of the Gaza Strip since 2007 and has embedded itself in hospitals, schools and elsewhere.
Gift of the Givers helps fund medical care for the poor in Gaza, and its employees have worked in Al Shifa Hospital, where the Israel Defense Forces found weapons and Hamas militants hiding among the sick. It also runs the Khuzaa clinic in Khan Yunis. Funding a medical clinic and providing medical care to the poor provide the Gift of the Givers with wriggle room, at best, to claim difficulty in distinguishing civilians from terrorists when dispensing humanitarian aid. At worst, it allows flagrant diversion of “humanitarian” aid to terrorists.
