Hamas Put On CreditWatch—Negative*

From the Wall Street Journal via MSN, April 16:

A Depleted Hamas Is So Low on Cash That It Can’t Pay Its Fighters 

Hamas is facing a new problem in Gaza: coming up with the cash it needs to pay its rank and file.

Israel last month cut off supplies of humanitarian goods to the enclave, some of which Hamas had been seizing and selling to raise funds, according to Arab, Israeli and Western officials. Its renewed offensive has targeted and killed Hamas officials who played important roles in distributing cash to cadres and sent others into hiding, Arab intelligence officials said.

In recent weeks, the Israeli military has said it killed a money changer who was key to what it called terrorist financing for Hamas as well as a number of top political officials in rapid succession.

The result for Hamas has been a debilitating squeeze.

Salary payments to many Gaza government employees have ceased, while many senior Hamas fighters and political staff began receiving only about half of their pay midway through last month’s Ramadan holy period, the intelligence officials said. Rank-and-file Hamas fighters’ pay had been averaging around $200 to $300 a month, they said.

The shortfalls are creating hardship across Hamas’s ranks in Gaza’s cash economy and signal a deepening organizational dysfunction in the militant group as it also contends with a more aggressive Israeli military strategy.

“Even if they sit on large amounts of cash, their ability to distribute it would be very limited right now,” said Eyal Ofer, an open-source researcher on Gaza’s economy. Ofer said Hamas’s typical payment methods were to have a courier carry cash or to set up a disbursement point, either of which could create targets for Israeli troops. “Those two things would grab attention,” he said.

Hamas didn’t respond to a request for comment on its financial position or its methods for sourcing cash....

....MUCH MORE

*Our headline is "fāke™" or, in the words of Sheldon Cooper, "A big fat whopper".

Most of the agencies remain neutral in their forecasts.

That's another big fat whopper.

S&P, which I thought owned the mark on CreditWatch when written in CamelCase (no spaces, individual words capitalized) but may not, doesn't cover Hamas as either a corp. or a sovereign.
Ditto for Moody's and Fitch. 
Instead they do stuff like this, from 2008: "'Like A Gang of Clowns in a Pie Shop': S&P Puts Moody's on CreditWatch (Negative)"

Russia's ACRA--see post-2016-sanctions post: Vladimir Putin Starts His Own Credit Ratings Firm--has privately had Hamas at junk for quite a while while China's Dagong Global Credit Rating Co., best known for 2010's "UPDATED: Chinese Credit Rating Agency Downgrades the Entire United States" is mum on the issue.
Now where was I?
Right.

Apparently there are a couple job openings in the payroll department.