Treasury crackdown exposes crypto's role in $2 million Hamas fundraising network — SkimNews
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- U.S. Treasury sanctioned a Hamas Al-Qassam Brigades member, France-based pair Faouzi Barika and Amel Oualid, and two charities accused of running a fundraising network that collected over $2 million between 2020 and 2026
- The network raised roughly $1.5 million after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, routing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency to Saleem Abdallah Saleem al-Zaq, a Gaza-based deputy battalion commander in the Al-Qassam Brigades
- Treasury explicitly stated that crypto is not Hamas's primary funding source, noting the group and similar outfits still rely mainly on conventional finance despite previous crypto-linked sanctions and seizures
- The action follows reports that Al-Qassam Brigades recently advised donors to avoid sending funds directly from Binance, instead routing through other crypto services before landing in a TRON wallet
- The sanctions freeze designated parties' U.S.-jurisdiction assets, bar Americans from transacting with them, and expose foreign financial institutions that knowingly facilitate significant transactions to secondary sanctions risk
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said "terrorist organizations like Hamas rely on sophisticated financial facilitators and fraudulent schemes designed to exploit the public"
Why it matters: Treasury is reframing crypto enforcement as targeting one layer of a wider financial network rather than Hamas's main pipeline, which sharpens the focus on human facilitators like Barika and Oualid and the humanitarian-charity front. Foreign banks and money services now face secondary-sanctions exposure for knowingly moving significant sums, materially raising the cost of servicing these networks even outside U.S. rails.
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