The Charities of Hamas – Designations History and Policy Recommendations
It has now been more than two years since Hamas’s deadly attack in Israel. As someone who worked for more than a decade in the United States Government (USG) as head of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau’s Office of Counterterrorism Finance and Designations CT/CTFD, I wanted to reflect on the financial methods, with a specific examination of charities, that Hamas has used to finance itself.
My views of Hamas’s financing activity are indelibly shaped by my own experiences of leading (between 2008-2018) CT/CTFD’s efforts to counter the financing of Hamas by using the Secretary of State’s Executive Order 13224 authorities to counter, by designating them as terrorists, leadership figures of this deadly terrorist group. Among those we sanctioned as terrorists were leaders and architects, such as Muhammed Deif, Yahya Sinwar, and Ismail Haniyeh, of the October 2023 attack.
Read the full paper.