US Treasury sanctions Hamas crypto network that raised $2 million

The US Treasury sanctioned a Hamas financing network on October 2, 2026. It blacklisted a Gaza-based operative, two fundraisers in France and the two charities they ran. Treasury said the group raised more than $2 million for Hamas, part of it in crypto.

OFAC, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, issued the designations under Executive Order 13224, the main US authority for terrorism-financing sanctions, as amended by Executive Order 13886. The State Department put out its own notice the same day. Both named all five targets.

"Terrorist organizations like Hamas rely on sophisticated financial facilitators and fraudulent schemes designed to exploit the public to sustain their operations," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the announcement.

Who the Treasury named

At the center is Saleem Abdallah Saleem al-Zaq, whom Treasury described as a battalion deputy in Hamas's Al-Qassam Brigades, the group's military wing. He is based in Gaza. OFAC said he ran a financial network that used money services businesses and crypto wallets to send funds to the brigades.

Two France-based fundraisers, Faouzi Barika and Amel Oualid, ran the charities that fed that network, according to OFAC. The two groups, Association Baraka and Ensemble C Mieux, presented themselves as humanitarian causes collecting money for civilians in Gaza. Treasury said the donations went to Hamas instead. Al-Zaq also promoted the charities' fundraising accounts on social media, OFAC said.

How the money moved

Treasury put the total at more than $2 million, raised between 2020 and 2026. About $1.5 million of that came after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. The crypto portion was smaller. Barika and Oualid sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency to al-Zaq, OFAC said, who allegedly passed it to the Al-Qassam Brigades.

So crypto was one channel, not the whole operation. Most of the money moved through the charities and money services businesses, by Treasury's own account. The agency did not name the exchanges or wallet providers involved, and it did not say how much of the crypto, if any, has been frozen.

Part of a wider crackdown on illicit crypto flows

This fits a pattern US and other regulators have pressed for two years. Governments now treat crypto wallets as one more place to trace terrorist and sanctions-evasion money, alongside banks and cash couriers.

Other governments have moved the same way. South Korea now lets its courts seize and sell crypto to settle debts. Brazil has ordered reporting of large self-custody transfers. The direction is the same across jurisdictions.

Chain analysis firms have long argued that crypto's public ledgers make such flows easier to trace than cash, not harder. This case cuts both ways. The network still raised most of its money the old way.

What to watch

Sanctions freeze any US-held assets and bar Americans from dealing with the named parties. They are not criminal charges, and none of the five has been convicted. Whether French authorities act against the fundraisers or the two charities is the next question, since all are based there.

Watch too for any follow-up that names specific wallets or exchanges. OFAC often adds crypto addresses to its sanctions list in later updates. It listed none here.