While Stopping the financing of terrorism is one of the most important, and most difficult, counterterrorism tasks, Palestinian Hamas, a mega-terror outfit is not only strengthening its military capabilities with funding from Iran and Qatar, David Cohen, former US Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence said that Qatar finances terrorists who live in Doha. Hamas is not the only Islamist organization that Qatar has supported over the years.
The German media news organization Die Zeit was first to report, in July 2020, on an American security contractor’s revelation that Qatar is financing Lebanese Hezbollah, an organization designated terrorist by the US and the EU.
The Al Thani family, which rules Qatar, supported the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM).
Richard Clarke, counterterrorism advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who revealed Qatar’s role with regard to 9/11 through its hiding of KSM, the future mastermind of those attacks, in Doha.
When the FBI came to arrest KSM, informing only the emir of Qatar, within hours KSM disappeared. Clarke concludes as follows: “Had the Qataris handed [KSM] over to us as requested in 1996, the world might have been a very different place”.
The United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT), whose records show that Qatar finances terrorists.
In 2017, four Arab countries — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain—launched a boycott of Qatar due to the Al Thani family’s support of terrorism and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
According to a research site, Hamas might have revenues as high as US$590 million per year, but only a small part of that is likely allocated to military/terrorist activities. The rest is allocated to organizational financing and service provision; however, Hamas has ample money to launch large, coordinated, and deadly terrorist attacks.
Until recently, it was perceived that Iran is the biggest funder of Hamas. But in reality, its key donor for the past several years is Qatar, while the ruling Thani family has been helping Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars every month and helping it in expanding a massive business network through the Middle East and the world.
The Tehran regime has been providing roughly US$100-150 million to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other Palestinian groups each year. Funds transferred from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force (IRGC-QF) are likely provided directly to Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz-Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades.
Hamas also receives funds from Turkey and Middle Eastern Muslims send a significant portion of their Zakat fund to Hamas, which is estimated to be around US$750 million to US$1 billion.
While disrupting Hamas’s financing networks is critically important to prevent future attacks, according to counterterrorism experts, this is going to be an extremely difficult task as the majority of the business establishments of Hamas are run by third parties – such as Arab and non-Arab individuals and companies. For this particular reason, targeting and destroying the financial network of Hamas is not easy.
The Qatari funding for Hamas is divided into two periods. The first, in the years 2007-2014, when the Qatari government financed Hamas as it saw fit, far from any international supervision and control, and the second from 2014 until today when Qatari financing is done in coordination with Israel, the United States and the United Nations. At the same time, independent financing channels operate all the time in Qatar, ignoring the authorities.
The Hamas organization does not rely only on state financial aid from Qatar and Iran, but over the years has established an international economic empire that is well disguised under false names and seemingly legitimate companies. Hamas uses all the countries in which it has a presence to operate its financing network, and in this aspect, the office of Hamas in Qatar, which opened in 2012, is no different.
Over the years, the leaders of Hamas and its operatives in Qatar have established a sophisticated financing network. In the past, it was reported that real estate investment companies belonging to Hamas are registered in Qatar under supposedly innocent names, including the names of women.
The one who is still assisting in the effort is Iran, which also has good relations with its Qatari neighbor. In November 2023, the authorities in the United States published a list of names of the prominent figures in the international financing network of Hamas. Among others, Muhammad Nasrallah was mentioned, a Jordanian citizen and veteran Hamas operative who settled in Doha, the capital of Qatar, and has been involved in recent years in transferring money to Hamas, including the military arm. This activist has close ties with Iran, which helps him.
Before the overthrow of the Islamist President Muhammad Morsi in Egypt, in July 2013, a document was circulated in the Arab media, supposedly from the Central Bank of Qatar, in which the transfer of US$250 million to the Political Bureau of Hamas was approved. It was then claimed that this amount was transferred as a special grant intended to protect Morsi’s rule through Hamas terrorists. The document’s authenticity has been questioned, but its publication reflected the atmosphere created around Qatar’s activities at the time. After the overthrow of Morsi and the return of the army to power, it was reported that Qatar transferred to Hamas a special adaptation grants worth US$350 million.
Although no conclusive evidence was given for the actual transfer of funds, in 2014 the then-US Undersecretary of the Treasury David Cohen stated that Qatar had been financing Hamas “for years”. This activity of Qatar also attracted the attention of the FATF organization, an international task force for the development and promotion of policies to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, which in recent years has published unflattering reports about the Gulf state.
According to an online recourse, Hamas also raises some funds from identity-based support networks. This includes donations from crowdfunding campaigns, with a small proportion of funds sent through cryptocurrency, but also funds diverted from international charities. Hamas also generates significant funds from its investment portfolio, much of which is in real estate in Sudan, Turkey, Algeria, and the United Arab Emirates.
State sponsorship and identity-based support networks will be difficult to detect and disrupt. They are part of Hamas’s broader facilitation network that the group uses to deploy funds for the purchase of weapons, components, and devices, and that helps to hide the movement of funds for the group. These networks need to be illuminated through careful and systematic intelligence collection and analysis, much of which will need to be financial in nature. Assets in this network need to be frozen and seized to deny Hamas access to these resources. These are already challenging aspects of counterterrorist financing that will require a serious investment of resources.
Cutting off Hamas’s financing is made more challenging by the lack of international unity on Hamas’s status as a terrorist organization. In the case of the Islamic State, progress was made in tackling the group’s finances through an international coalition. Some coalitions in place already might be able to tackle elements of Hamas’s financing—this could include action by the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center, which brings together Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. But Hamas holds assets in many other countries – such as Algeria, Turkey, and Sudan.
Seeking anonymity, a counterterrorism organization said, Hamas has not only invested in real estate, cryptocurrency, restaurant, bar, cocktail lounge, nightclubs, casinos and hotel industry, it also has been investing significant amount of fund through third-party in several stock exchanges in Asian nations, Europe and even the United States. Furthermore, since Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Hamas has further extended its connections with narco-jihadist network and transnational drug trafficking network and been investing significant amount of cash in the trade of cocaine and amphetamine which are being trafficked mainly into Western countries via Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico and other nations in South America.
According to rough assessment, Hamas is making hundreds of millions of dollars from the narco-trade alone. It has also reportedly established distribution networks in major Western cities.
