The US Treasury sanctioned a member of Hamas’s military wing, two France-based individuals and two affiliated charities over a six-year network that collected more than $2 million for Hamas through sham humanitarian fronts and cryptocurrency channels. The Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the designations on October 2 as part of a coordinated action with the FBI, and crypto commentary around the story resurfaced this week after CoinDesk picked it up Monday.
Treasury said Barika and Oualid, the two France-based fundraisers, collected more than $2 million for Hamas between 2020 and 2026, with $1.5 million of that raised after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. The pair sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency to al-Zaq, whom the agency described as a Gaza-based deputy battalion commander in the Al-Qassam Brigades. Al-Zaq advertised both fundraisers’ accounts on his own social media, letting the France-based teams collect under charitable labels while the Gaza commander listed the wallets.
What the designations do
The designations were issued under Executive Order 13224, the primary counterterrorism sanctions authority. They freeze assets the designated parties hold under US jurisdiction and bar US persons from dealing with them. For crypto businesses the practical effect runs through compliance desks: US-reachable exchanges and processors must block or reject wallets and addresses tied to the designees, and any licensed entity can apply for specific licenses or exemptions from OFAC.
Treasury’s language matters for how the story gets told. The agency said money services businesses and digital assets were among the network’s tools, alongside deceptive fundraising schemes. It did not say the full $2 million moved in crypto, and CryptoSlate’s writeup flags exactly that distinction: the broader fundraising total and the specific crypto transfers Treasury attributes to Barika and Oualid are two separate figures, hundreds of thousands against the $2 million-plus. Reporting that flattens the two overstates crypto’s share of the network’s flows.
The action “exposes a sophisticated, multi-year financing architecture that moved more than $2 million to Hamas through deceptive charitable fronts and cryptocurrency channels,” Treasury’s press release reads, adding that it shows Hamas’s “persistent ability to adapt its fundraising mechanisms to evade detection.”
The France side of the ledger
Two designated entities are France-based charities. That jurisdiction matters because French authorities have been running their own case threads on Hamas fundraising within minority charitable networks, and US sanctions impose parallel restrictions that complicate any legal challenge. Readers of the designations will note the pattern: collect under humanitarian labels in a tolerant jurisdiction, move to a conflict zone through informal rails, list receiving wallets on personal social channels for donors.
The State Department issued a matching statement calling the network a case of terrorist financing disguised as legitimate aid work, and framed it as close coordination between State, Treasury and the FBI, including on ventures active inside the United States. Treasury did not disclose arrests in its release; the FBI-led operation remains multi-jurisdictional.
Where crypto sits in it
The episode lands in a month of overlapping enforcement signals. The chain-analytics literature has consistently downplayed Hamas’s reliance on crypto relative to cash tables and Gulf charitable channels, and Treasury’s own framing here keeps crypto as one rail among several rather than the spine of the network. Treasury followed on October 5 with tightened rules around Russia’s ruble-backed A7A5 token, whose reported $179 billion in two-year volume dwarfs this case and shows how the enforcement priority skews to large sanctions-evasion pipelines, not just terror financing.
For exchanges, the risk register from this case is threefold: donations sourced under charitable labels from designated jurisdictions, outbound transfers to listed individual wallets, and fundraising marketing that skirts evasion schemes on social channels. None of those requires sophisticated on-chain forensics to detect at the wallet level; the designations name the actors and Treasury’s typical practice is to publish identifying information alongside the listing.
The October enforcement context
The sanctions landed the same week US regulators were rewriting their own crypto frameworks. The CFTC said its chair Michael Selig is drafting market rules under existing authority after the Clarity Act failed in the Senate, and FinCEN proposed a rule to cut US banks out of the A7 payments pipeline. Against that backdrop, the Hamas action reads in two registers at once: a counterterrorism action with a specific named network, and a demonstration that enforcement on digital assets is running at full pace regardless of the legislative gap.
The fundraising figures also put the scale in perspective. Hamas’s broader financing, as publicly assessed, runs through state patronage and cash channels measured in the hundreds of millions annually. A $2 million network is a real case, but small as terror financing goes, and the six-year collection window shows why designation lists, rather than single transfers, are the enforcement instrument of choice: the same financiers kept collecting after the October 7 attack, and $1.5 million of the total came in that period.
CoinDesk’s Monday pickup frames the story as evidence that US authorities now treat crypto as one rail inside wider illicit-finance networks rather than the headline themselves. Treasury’s own numbers bear that out. The action names frozen wallets, tells exchanges who to block, and distinguishes, in its own arithmetic, between sham-charity dollars and crypto transfers. The durable compliance lesson is the blending of charitable labels with listed wallets on social media, a combination detection desks can screen for without waiting for the next press release.