The United States is offering up to $10 million for information on five Hamas financiers or anything leading to the disruption of the Palestinian militant group’s financial mechanisms, the State Department said on Friday.
The reward offering follows four rounds of US sanctions on Hamas after the group’s deadly incursion into Israel on 7 October, which Israel says killed 1 200 people. Israel’s subsequent military retaliation in Gaza has killed 22 600 people, local health officials say, and left much of the enclave in ruins.
The five are Abdelbasit Hamza Elhassan Khair, Amer Kamal Sharif Alshawa, Ahmed Sadu Jahleb, Walid Mohammed Mustafa Jadallah, and Muhammad Ahmad 'Abd Al-Dayim Nasrallah, who have all been previously designated global terrorists by the United States, the department said in a statement.
The first financier, known as Hamza, is based in Sudan, has managed numerous companies in Hamas’ investment portfolio and was involved in the transfer of almost $20 million to Hamas, the department said. He is tied to Sudanese President Omar Bashir and Islamist groups undermining stability in Sudan, according to the State Department.
Or, the people who fund global terrorist groups are well-connected and able to fund a global proxy network of company owners who are completely unconnected to them, and they are smart enough never to communicate this information in a technological manner.
Cyber capabilities don’t help if the adversary is 7 degrees of separation away and doesn’t use technology to transmit the information.