"USA Indicts Hamas Leaders for Israel Massacre and Related Terror Attacks"

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas' political chief, has been charged with orchestrating attacks that led to the deaths of at least 43 Americans, alongside charges against five other senior Hamas leaders.

Federal prosecutors have charged Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and five senior members of the group with orchestrating years of terrorist attacks in Israel, including the Oct. 7 massacre, according to a comprehensive complaint unsealed on Tuesday.

Originally filed in New York in February, the criminal complaint also implicated two additional senior Hamas members who were not previously thought to be directly involved in the attacks. It confirmed that 43 Americans were believed to have died in the violence.

The other leaders named in the charges include Ismail Haniyeh, who managed Hamas’s political office in Qatar; Muhammad Deif, the commander of the group’s military wing; Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of the military wing; Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut; and Khaled Meshal, a former political leader of the group who remains a top official. Both Deif and Issa were killed in Israeli airstrikes during the Gaza conflict. Haniyeh, a leading figure in cease-fire negotiations, was assassinated in Iran after a bomb was covertly smuggled into his guesthouse.

Meshal, who resides in Qatar, and Haniyeh were not known to have directly participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. They, along with Barakeh, were outside Gaza when the attacks occurred, catching Israel off guard. Haniyeh was living in Doha at the time of his death.

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 Salem/Reuters By Adam GoldmanRonen Bergman and Glenn Thrush

The complaint extensively documents Hamas’s history of violence, including bombings in the 1990s that resulted in American casualties, as well as statements made by the Hamas officials named in the charges.

Hamas received funding through donations, cryptocurrency, and financial transfers from the Iranian government, according to the complaint.

The Justice Department revealed that the charges were initially kept under seal after being filed in February, aiming to arrest Haniyeh and possibly other defendants while preventing them from going into hiding. However, after Haniyeh’s assassination, the department decided there was no longer sufficient reason to maintain the secrecy of the charges.

U.S. officials had also been concerned that publicizing the charges could provoke Hamas and endanger hostages like Mr. Goldberg-Polin. But his death last week altered that consideration.

The United States designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist association in October 1997, following a series of bombings in Israel that killed multitudinous civilians, including women and children. The group’s duty explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel.

Sinwar and Deif were both labeled as terrorists by the United States in 2015. Sinwar, considered one of Hamas’s most influential leaders and an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, came the group’s political chief after Haniyeh’s death in late July. Born in a Gaza exile camp in 1962, Sinwar was raised by parents who, along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinian Arabs, fled during the conflicts girding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. constantly arrested by Israeli authorities, Sinwar spent over two decades in an Israeli prison before being released in a 2011 prisoner exchange. Rising through Hamas’s species, he was tagged its leader in Gaza in 2017. The Justice Department, in its lawless charges, emphasized the extensive compass of Hamas’s attacks as detailed in the complaint. “ Hamas and its leaders have constantly upheld the destruction of Israel as their core ideal, ” the complaint countries, “ using murder and other violent terrorist acts against Israelis and their backers, including Americans, as the primary means to achieve that thing. As a central element of this charge, Hamas leaders have specifically called for retaliation against the United States in response to U.S. support for Israel’s actuality. ” The International Criminal Court in the Netherlands has issued arrest concurrences related to the Israel- Gaza conflict, accusing both sides of war crimes. In May, it requested concurrences for Haniyeh, Deif, and Sinwar, as well as for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. In an Oct. 8, 2023, interview on Russia Today TV, Barakeh revealed that Hamas had been privately planning the attack for two times.