US Treasury Sanctions Hamas Network That Moved $2 Million via Bitcoin (BTC)

Treasury Sanctions $2 Million Hamas Funding Network

The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated three individuals and two charities it accuses of moving over $2 million to Hamas via deceptive charity fronts and crypto channels. The action names Saleem al-Zaq, whom Treasury describes as a battalion deputy in Hamas's armed wing, based in Gaza, together with France-based fundraisers Faouzi Barika and Amel Oualid. The two entities, Association Baraka and Ensemble C Mieux, presented themselves as charities collecting aid for civilians in Gaza, but the department says donations were pooled and passed to al-Zaq, who forwarded them to the al-Qassam Brigades. His network relied on money services businesses and crypto wallets to move the funds, the release states. Designations of this kind freeze any property the named parties hold under US jurisdiction and bar US persons from dealings with them. The Justice Department separately unsealed charges against al-Zaq and said 6 people had been arrested. Prosecutors put the sum raised by al-Zaq and his associates at roughly $1.75 million through December 2025, of which at least $626,000 came from US donors; Treasury frames the wider network as having moved more than $2 million overall. In its press release, the department called the designations an exposure of a “sophisticated, multi-year financing architecture” built to evade detection. Notably, OFAC's entries list no wallet addresses, and Treasury did not specify what share of the total moved on-chain, stating only that Barika and Oualid sent al-Zaq several hundred thousand dollars' worth of digital assets. Bitcoin (BTC) price showed no sharp reaction to the news in thin weekend trading.

From Western Union to Bitcoin in December 2021

The mechanics, laid out in the unsealed indictment and in blockchain-analytics work, show a deliberate pivot toward digital currency. Al-Zaq initially received money through Western Union; in December 2021, prosecutors say, he asked a partner in France to send Bitcoin (BTC) or another digital currency instead, because he believed crypto would make the origin and destination of payments harder to trace. Donations collected in France were partly pooled in a French bank account before moving onward, as Chainalysis described in a post on X dated Friday, October 2, 2026. The pivot did not go unnoticed. When one crypto platform asked about the source of funds in May 2023, the partner moved to a different exchange, the familiar cat-and-mouse that pushes illicit flows toward the weakest compliance desk, a risk any exchange or market maker operation now prices in. Chainalysis later identified a counterparty connected to al-Zaq's exchange deposit address; that same counterparty also sent funds to exchange addresses that had received money from Hamas-linked wallets previously covered by Israeli seizure orders. Neither Treasury nor prosecutors have disclosed which exchanges were involved. The two French fronts, meanwhile, promised real-world aid for Gaza civilians, from food to shelter, while routing cash to al-Zaq. The action extends a line that began with OFAC's designation of the Gaza-based exchange Buy Cash in October 2023, the first high-profile move against a venue accused of serving Hamas fundraising.

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COINOTAG's read: the designation and the unsealed indictment attack the same node, the handoff between traditional finance and crypto. Because OFAC's entries name entities but no wallet addresses, the enforcement lever is organizational, and the DOJ charges plus the traced counterparty carry the evidentiary weight. The December 2021 request for Bitcoin (BTC) and the May 2023 venue swap show how one compliance question can redirect an entire network's flows, a pattern earlier actions have repeated across service types from exchanges to crypto mining pools. The recurring FUD that crypto is the main artery of terror financing also sits uneasily beside Treasury's own numbers: at most a few hundred thousand dollars of the $2 million total ran on-chain, while the rest moved through banks and money services businesses.