In 2018, Israeli security officials acquired confidential documents detailing a Hamas-operated private equity fund that financed its activities, the NY Times reported on Saturday. The documents, taken from the computer of a senior Hamas official, outlined assets valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, including controlling shares of mining, chicken farming, and road construction companies in Sudan, skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, a property developer in Algeria, and a real estate firm that was listed on the Turkish stock exchange.
Despite the potential significance of these documents as a roadmap for disrupting Hamas’s plans, no action was taken. The findings were shared with both Israeli and US agencies, but none of the Hamas-owned companies faced sanctions from the United States or Israel. There was no public call-out of the companies, and there was no pressure on Turkey, the hub of Hamas’s financial network, to close it.
Udi Levy, a former chief of Mossad’s economic warfare division, told the NYT, “Everyone is talking about failures of intelligence on Oct. 7, but no one is talking about the failure to stop the money. It’s the money – the money – that allowed this.”
According to the report, the Treasury Department, which finally acted against the Hamas financial network in 2022, now believes its assets were sold in time, and will be used to launch the next phase in the terrorist group’s war to annihilate Israel.
Levy says he briefed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015 about the Hamas portfolio, “But he didn’t care that much about it.” The Mossad chief at the time, probably Yossi Cohen, eventually shut down Levy’s Task Force Harpoon that focused on disrupting the terrorists’ money flow.
Meanwhile, major American and European banks continued to buy shares in Hamas’s Turkish company until it was finally placed under sanctions in 2022. Those clients included the Moroun Church.
In mid-2018, the Saudis arrested the Hamas accountant, Mahmoud Ghazal, and two other men who held positions in 18 companies in the Hamas portfolio. Ghazal confessed that the portfolio existed to transfer money to Hamas, and said that Jordanian businessman Ahmed Odeh directed where the money went. The two other men told their interrogators that they were shareholders in name only. Their stakes were actually owned by another Jordanian businessman, Hisham Qafisheh, who was also a Hamas operative.
The Saudis shared their findings with Washington, as did the Israeli team, hoping the Americans would declare financial sanctions on the Hamas operatives, but got only crickets until 2022.
By the time the sanctions were finally imposed, the Hamas agents had been able to get rid of their shares and also received commercial contracts worth some $7.5 million in exchange for their assets.
