Gaza and Charities at War: US Seeks Evidence Before Designating Charities as Terrorist Supporters
The world ought to impose a ceasefire in Gaza. Media reports, quoting a speech by Vice President Harris, suggest that a six week ceasefire is imminent. But imminent still isn’t soon enough and six weeks isn’t long enough. Men, women, children, babies, dogs and cats are hanging on to life by their ragged fingernails — even just to find a place to relieve themselves with a little dignity. More than 100 were killed when Israeli troops got spooked and fired on desperate starving people as they crowded around an aid convoy last week. Meanwhile, the U.S. began dropping Meals, Ready to Eat (MRE’s) from C-130s. If God is not sobbing, then there is no God.
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States and its allies are asking Israel for evidence to back its claim that charities, even some in the United States, are supporting Hamas and should be designated as terrorist supporting organizations. That designation would be a financial death sentence for charities, cutting off access to all their funding, indefinitely suspending their tax exemption and imposing criminal sanctions on anybody engaging in any sort of transaction with the designated organizations. So yeah, there ought to be independent evidence, not just assertions from one of the belligerents. That’s how due process works. Or am I just being biased in favor of decency and humanity? Meanwhile, a bill to require more due process before suspending tax exempt status for organizations accused of supporting terrorists is going nowhere in Congress. From the WSJ:
An international push to disrupt Hamas financing has hit a roadblock over an effort to determine which charities are helping the militant group and which are legitimate nonprofits raising funds to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, according to Western officials. The U.S., Israel and more than a dozen allies created a task force on terror financing following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Since then, they have used sanctions to target Hamas financiers, currency exchanges and corporate networks, as well as offering multimillion-dollar bounties for information on financial facilitators.
But now, more than four months later, the U.S. has yet to act against many nonprofit groups that Israel says are run by Hamas, including charities in the U.S. and Europe. These groups have directed tens of millions of dollars to Gaza since the war began, according to current and former Western officials. The U.S. and others have acted against a number of the organizations flagged by Israel, said a senior U.S. official, but in a lot of cases “allies have been asking for credible evidence for a long time, but are still waiting.”
The disagreement over the charities comes as the U.S. pushes for a cease-fire in Gaza in the midst of mounting Palestinian deaths and a worsening humanitarian crisis, as well as a debate over Israeli allegations linking United Nations Relief and Works Agency staff to Hamas. Washington and other Western capitals suspended aid to Unrwa after Israel said 12 of the organization’s staffers were involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas assault.
Hamas collects about $100 million a year from its chief benefactor, Iran, as well as revenue from a global investment portfolio and donations through nonprofit organizations abroad, according to Western officials. But Israel’s military operation has deprived Hamas of its biggest source of funding: the roughly $600 million a year the group collected in taxes in Gaza.
As a result, foreign funding, including from charities, is now critical for the group, Western officials say. “We are already seeing online grassroots campaigns, linked to so-called charities that we’ve previously designated, solicit funds under the guise of humanitarianism,” said Brian Nelson, the U.S. Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.
The debate, however, centers around which charities are linked to Hamas and which are funding purely humanitarian work in Gaza. For example, Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing, the Ministry of Defense unit responsible for disrupting terror funding, lists a number of fundraising campaigns hosted by Michigan-based LaunchGood, a nonprofit that crowdsources funding for some of the largest Muslim charities in the world.
LaunchGood hosts a Muslim Aid USA campaign and nearly two dozen other accounts that Israel says is tied to Hamas. It has also hosted campaigns for rebuilding Jewish cemeteries and for victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018. The U.S. hasn’t taken action against any of the campaigns or charities on the fundraising platform. LaunchGood, which disputes Israel’s allegations, said it has established a vigorous compliance program in part because of the special scrutiny that Islamic groups have come under in the U.S.
“Every charity currently fundraising for Palestine has to pass three separate compliance checks, including independently audited financials and annual reports, screening of beneficial owners and directors, and continuous monitoring of programs and transactions by our compliance software, which was developed by former U.S. Treasury security officials,” said Chris Blauvelt, a co-founder.
The charities designated by Israel on LaunchGood’s site have undergone scrutiny by the Western governments that regulate them, Blauvelt said. In addition, the site offers visibility into the donors and the charities involved, promoting accountability, he added.
darryll k. jones