During an emergency meeting of the Terrorist Financing Targeting Centre (TFTC) this week, the United States urged its Middle Eastern allies to step up efforts to sever foreign funding for Hamas, the group responsible for the October 7 attack on Israeli citizens.
The TFTC’s member nations, which include 2.3 million Palestinians living under constant Israeli bombardment for over two weeks, were urged by the Treasury Department to exert more of their influence in order to halt the flow of funding to Hamas.
Since 1997, the United States has categorised Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
“In our view, the Palestinian people are harmed when we do nothing to stop Hamas and its terrorism,”
“From a financial perspective, it is evident that Hamas has made the economic suffering in the Gaza Strip worse for decades by using humanitarian aid to further its terrorist operations, and we have to publicly denounce these actions.”
The United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar comprise the TFTC.
“We cannot tolerate a world in which the fundraisers for Hamas and other terrorist organisations live and operate with impunity, abusing the financial system, to sustain their terror,” Nelson stated in his speech. That is not a world that the United States will accept.
The TFTC was established in 2017 and is headquartered in Riyadh. It convenes government officials from member nations to explore ways of working together to combat money laundering in general and to lessen the flow of funding to terrorist organisations.
The situation between Israel and Gaza prompted the decision to move up the summit that was supposed to take place in November to this week.
Expert in thwarting terrorism financing, Jessica Davis, a visiting senior fellow at the Soufan Centre, told VOA that as the belief that Hamas posed less of a threat from terrorism in recent years has grown, international efforts to clamp down on the organization’s funding sources have weakened.
Davis remarked, “That was obviously wrong.” The events on October 7 show how problematic Hamas is still. And that will undoubtedly cause some governments to change their priorities and step up their attempts to stop their financing.
The United States will be requesting that the TFTC members and other nations in the area quicken this transition.
There are undoubtedly many potential sources of funding for Hamas that may be closed, and they are not limited to the Middle East, the speaker stated. “Historically, Hamas has been able to operate large networks with the help of identity-based support networks and charitable organisations.”
“There are numerous networks like these all over the world,” Davis stated. There are those that are larger and those who are smaller. Though many of them are outside the Middle East, many of them are in the region. And at this moment, the world community can actually make a difference through [those networks].
She stated that the closure of those networks may significantly affect Hamas’ ability to carry out its activities.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee wrote to the Biden administration on Wednesday, requesting guarantees from USAID that humanitarian aid reaching the Gaza Strip’s residents won’t end up in the hands of Hamas or any other groups the US government considers terrorists.
24 Republican members of the committee, including chairman James Comer, signed the letter, which was written to Samantha Power, the administrator of USAID.
The letter said that it is obvious that considerable financial resources were employed for these attacks given the scope and complexity of the heinous Hamas atrocities that started on October 7 in Israel. It noted that funding to Gaza had been drastically cut under the Trump administration due to the challenge of ensuring that it was not being utilised to support Hamas; the Biden administration then changed this stance.
The letter outlined the committee’s request for information from USAID and emphasised that both Israelis and U.S. citizens had suffered direct injury as a result of the Hamas assaults.
Numerous American victims and hostages have been among the numerous murders and injuries brought about by Hamas’s most recent crimes, the statement claimed. This incident emphasises how crucial it is to make sure humanitarian money doesn’t unintentionally boost funding for terrorist activities.