Biden administration rolls out new sanctions package targeting Hamas

The Biden administration debuted a new set of sanctions Wednesday seeking to disrupt Hamas‘s financial operations following its attack on Israeli civilians.

The Department of Treasury announced the step, which collectively targets 10 “key Hamas terrorist group members, operatives and financial facilitators in Gaza, Sudan, Turkey, Algeria, and Qatar.”

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The package specifically focuses on “members managing assets in a secret Hamas investment portfolio, a Qatar-based financial facilitator with close ties to the Iranian regime, a key Hamas commander, and a Gaza-based virtual currency exchange and its operator.”

“The United States is taking swift and decisive action to target Hamas’s financiers and facilitators following its brutal and unconscionable massacre of Israeli civilians, including children,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement. “The U.S. Treasury has a long history of effectively disrupting terror finance and we will not hesitate to use our tools against Hamas. We will continue to take all steps necessary to deny Hamas terrorists the ability to raise and use funds to carry out atrocities and terrorize the people of Israel. That includes by imposing sanctions and coordinating with allies and partners to track, freeze, and seize any Hamas-related assets in their jurisdictions.”

President Joe Biden is currently in Israel to show solidarity with the victims of Hamas’s attacks, which killed more than a thousand people.

The president was originally slated to travel to Jordan following his stop in Tel Aviv to meet with the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and Jordan, but the White House canceled the summit after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas backed out of the meeting over a deadly explosion at a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday that Palestinians blame on Israel.

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The Israeli Defense Forces say the attack was caused by a misfiring rocket launched by the terrorist group “Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

“The point is, is that I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion of the hospital in Gaza yesterday, and based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden said of the attack, which the Palestinian Authority says killed more than 500 people, during a bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday. “But there’s a lot of people out there not sure, so we’ve got a lot — we’ve got to overcome a lot of things.”