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MANHATTAN (CN) — The U.S. Department of Justice unsealed and announced terrorism and conspiracy charges on Tuesday afternoon against top Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other Palestinian operatives for carrying out the violent coordinated terror attacks across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“They perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Tuesday of the seven-count criminal indictment at a press conference in Washington D.C.
“As outlined in our complaint, those defendants — armed with weapons, political support, and funding from the Government of Iran, and support from Hizballah — have led Hamas’ efforts to destroy the State of Israel and murder civilians in support of that aim,” he said. “The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations. These actions will not be our last.”
In August, Hamas named Sinwar — who was already the organization’s top official in Gaza who masterminded the Oct. 7 attacks — as its new leader after his predecessor, Ismail Haniye, was killed in an Israeli strike in Tehran, Iran.
The DOJ charges Sinwar, the deceased Haniye and four others on counts including conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization resulting in death, conspiracy to provide material support for acts of terrorism resulting in death, conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals, conspiracy to bomb a place of public use resulting in death, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction resulting in death, conspiracy to finance terrorism and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams called the Oct. 7 attacks “a depraved act of savagery”.
“This office has long been dedicated to serving as a bulwark against terrorism and striking blows against its leaders,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “Our commitment is clear: if you hurt one member of our community, you hurt all of us — and we stand with all victims of Hamas’ reign of terror.”
The case is being handled by the Department of Justice’s National Security and International Narcotics Unit and Money Laundering and Transnational Criminal Enterprises Unit.
Officials note in the indictment that Hamas received tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency payments in recent years from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Qods Force to fund its paramilitary activities.
Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya, commonly known as Hamas, has long demanded a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Hamas has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States government since 1997.
Sinwar, 61, has Hamas’ leader inside Gaza since 2017, and is one of the founders of the group’s armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigade.
He was arrested by Israel in the late 1980s, and eventually sentenced to four life terms for offenses that included the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers. He was released in 2011 as part of a massive prisoner swap in which Israeli officials freed more than one thousand prisoners in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been captured by Hamas.
The U.S. State Department designated Sinwar a global terrorist in 2015, which prohibited American citizens from engaging in transactions with Sinwar. He has also been sanctioned by the authorities in the United Kingdom and France.
He has not appeared in public since the Oct. 7 attacks.
Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023 killed over 1,200 people, “including over 40 Americans,” and kidnapped hundreds more, the DOJ says in the indictment.
Israel vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation for its Oct. 7 attack, igniting its nearly eleven-month war in Gaza, which has killed least 40,819 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, while also displacing nearly 2.3 million from their homes, and destroying enormous swaths of Gaza’s towns and cities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged “total victory” over Hamas and blames the group for the failure of negotiations to return hostages and end the siege, which have dragged on for much of this year.
Sinwar and the other living defendants named in the indictment have not yet been arrested.
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