Leading philanthropist cuts off groups over apparent support for October 7

However, in the wake of October 7, the trust pulled support for a “handful” of organisations – five out of some 400 – after it emerged they had posted “disturbing material” in response to the Hamas attack.

Writing in the Sunday Times, Rausing said one group, working on social and economic rights in Tunisia, had expressed “pride” in Hamas’s actions, while another called for “support for the guerrilla Palestinian people in their war against the Zionist entity”, which they said “was shaken due to the action of the Palestinian resistance […] invading the occupied lands and Zionist settlements”.

Another had referred to the attack as “resistance” to “colonisation” and described the victims as “settlers”, she wrote.

When a separate group, in Canada, quickly labelled Israel’s response “genocidal”, and described the country as a “settler colonialist white-supremacist state” the Sigrid Rausing Trust felt it had “condoned the Hamas atrocities”.

After the trust began receiving criticism on social media for its withdrawal of support, Rausing said she began to wonder how the human rights field became “entangled with the sort of anti-Zionism we see playing out on certain university campus protests or in hard-left factions”.

While she does not believe that most of the protesters and campus occupiers in the last few years were personally antisemitic, she wrote that “it’s hard to find the putative separation between anti-Zionism convincing when the two concepts are so clearly entangled in history”.

While firm in her condemnation of supporters of Hamas, Rausing was also critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, including “support for violent settlers on the West Bank”, and she suggested the IDF “may have committed war crimes”.

The Sigrid Rausing Trust has given strong support to Israeli NGOs critical of the Netanyahu government and of the occupation of the West Bank – from 2007 to 2019, it gave £1.8 million in grants to the human rights group B’Tselem.

In 2025, it earmarked £100,000 each to Physicians for Human Rights’ Israeli affiliate – which has characterised Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” – Israeli veterans organisation Breaking the Silence, and the left-wing Israeli online magazine +972. It has also given £25,000 to the Israeli anti-occupation group Yesh Din.

A £100,000 grant has also gone this year to an Israeli organisation promoting equality between groups inside Israel, aChord: Social Psychology for Social Change.