The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that although Israel and the United States are working together to block off Hamas funding channels, the countries are at odds after the U.S. refused to impose sanctions on certain organizations detailed by Israel.
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According to the report, after Israel has provided a list of numerous "charitable organizations" it claimed operate in service of Hamas or under its management, the Americans have so far refrained from imposing sanctions on many of them - claiming that they were not convinced that these organizations were not genuinely seeking to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Strip.
According to the report, a joint Israeli-U.S. task force was established after the terrorist group’s attack on October 7 - and its work has already led to sanctions against entities that fund Hamas and money exchange networks. It also offered rewards worth millions of dollars for information that would disrupt the terror organization's money flow.
However, Western sources told the American newspaper that the efforts were now facing obstacles. According to these sources, the U.S. has refrained from acting against organizations that have transferred tens of millions of dollars to the Strip since the beginning of the war, allegedly as charity for Gazans.
A senior American official told the paper that the U.S. and other countries have already taken action against some of the charitable organizations flagged by Israel as suspicious. “Allies have been asking for credible evidence for a long time, but are still waiting,” the official was quoted as saying adding that the U.S. wouldn’t hesitate to impose sanctions should the evidence be provided.
The report also detailed what appears to be another possible point of contention. According to the Wall Street Journal, the American intelligence community believes that some UNRWA employees were involved in Hamas’s attack on October 7, but it hasn’t accepted the accusations that a large portion of UNRWA relief agency workers were linked to Hamas.
Israel handed its evidence of the involvement of UNRWA employees in the massacre, to the UN and the U.S., along with it’s estimate that about 10% of agency employees were connected in some way to terror organizations in the Strip.
The WSJ emphasized the importance of funds raised through organizations claiming to be charities, for Hamas: the terror group, Western sources said, receives around $100 million annually from Iran, its main patron, alongside income from international investment assets and worldwide donations.
However, according to the sources, the IDF’s ground operation in the Strip managed to target and disrupt Hamas’s main income of $600 million in tax revenue collection in the Strip annually.
Now, these charitable funds became a critical source of funding. " We are already seeing online grassroots campaigns, linked to so-called charities that we’ve previously designated, solicit funds under the guise of humanitarianism,” Brian Nelson, the U.S. Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence told the American outlet.