Hamas money trail found long ago
But with Iran threat looming, no effort made to shut it down
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israeli security officials scored a major intelligence coup in 2018: secret documents that laid out, in intricate detail, what amounted to a private equity fund that Hamas used to finance its operations.
The ledgers, pilfered from the computer of a senior Hamas official, listed assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hamas controlled mining, chicken farming and road building companies in Sudan; twin skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates; a property developer in Algeria; and a real estate firm listed on the Turkish stock exchange.
The documents, which The New York Times reviewed, were a potential road map for choking off Hamas’ money and thwarting its plans. The agents who obtained the records shared them inside their government and in Washington. Nothing happened.
For years, none of the companies named in the ledgers faced sanctions from the United States or Israel. Nobody publicly called out the companies or pressured Turkey, the hub of the financial network, to shut it down.
The Times reviewed previously undisclosed intelligence documents and corporate records and interviewed dozens of current officials from the United States, Israel, Turkey and Hamas’ financial network. The investigation found senior Israeli and American officials failed to prioritize financial intelligence — which they had in hand — showing that tens of millions of dollars flowed from the companies to Hamas at the exact moment that it was buying new weapons and preparing an attack.
That money, American and Israeli officials now say, helped Hamas build up its military infrastructure and helped lay the groundwork for the Oct. 7 attacks.
“Everyone is talking about failures of intelligence on Oct. 7, but no one is talking about the failure to stop the money,” said Udi Levy, a former chief of the economic warfare division of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service. “It’s the money — the money — that allowed this.”
Even after the Treasury Department levied sanctions against the network in 2022, records show, Hamaslinked figures were able to obtain millions of dollars by selling shares in a blacklisted company. The Treasury Department now fears such money will allow Hamas to finance its continuing war with Israel and to rebuild when it is over.
Israeli leaders believed Hamas was more interested in governing than fighting. By the time the agents discovered the ledgers in 2018, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was encouraging the government of Qatar to deliver millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip. He gambled that the money would buy stability and peace.
Levy recalled briefing Netanyahu personally in 2015 about early work tracking the Hamas portfolio.
“I can tell you for sure that I talked to him about this,” Levy said. “But he didn’t care that much about it.”
Netanyahu’s Mossad chief shut down Levy’s team, Task Force Harpoon, that focused on disrupting the money flowing to groups.
Former Harpoon agents grew so frustrated with the inaction that they uploaded some documents to Facebook, hoping companies and investors would find them and stop doing business with Hamas-linked companies.
In the years that followed the 2018 discovery, Hamas’ money network burrowed deeper into the mainstream financial system, records show.
Israeli security and intelligence officials, working from a secure compound outside Tel Aviv, Israel, spent years tracking Hamas’ money. By 2015, they were on to what they called Hamas’ “secret investment portfolio.”
Terrorist organizations often use front companies to launder money. But here, Israeli agents saw something different, more ambitious: a multinational network of real businesses churning out real profits.
On paper, they looked like unrelated companies. But over and over, the Israelis said they identified the same Hamas-linked figures as shareholders, executives and board members.
There were people like Hisham Qafisheh, a white-goateed Jordanian who studied in Saudi Arabia and had a knack for finding political support. One of his companies won a $500 million highway contract in Sudan.
Then there was Amer Al-Shawa, a Turkish man of Palestinian descent who studied electrical engineering in Ohio and more recently spent five months under interrogation in an Emirati jail on suspicion of funding Hamas.
At the top was Ahmed Odeh, a Jordanian businessperson with years of experience in Saudi Arabia. The Israelis learned Hamas’ governing Shura Council had given Odeh seed money to build and manage a portfolio of companies.
Hamas, the de facto governing body of Gaza, relied principally on Iran to fund its military wing.
But Hamas wanted its own funding stream too.
The Israeli security services operated a terrorism-finance investigative team at the time called Task Force Harpoon. It put people from across counterterrorism under the same umbrella and gave them a direct report to the prime minister.
Harpoon churned out intelligence to financial regulators, law enforcement agencies, politicians and allies in Washington, helping Israel win financial sanctions targeting Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah.
Back then, the consensus among Israeli officials was that Iran was the bigger threat.