Attorney General Merrick Garland announced terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion charges against six senior leaders of Hamas.
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
US Justice Department charges Hamas leaders with terrorism as Israel’s Foreign Minister urged countries around the world to condemn and issue sanctions against Hamas and Iran.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Tuesday the unsealing of terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion charges against six senior leaders of Hamas.
Hamas was charged with playing a “central role in planning, supporting, and perpetrating the terrorist atrocities that Hamas committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.”
Garland continued, “Hamas terrorists … murdered nearly 1200 people, including over 40 Americans, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians.”
He added, “This weekend, we learned that Hamas murdered an additional six people they had kidnapped and held captive for nearly a year, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23 year old Israeli American.”
Garland said, “We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of Hamas’ brutal murders of Americans, as an act of terrorism. ”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz urged embassies around the world to influence governments to sanction Hamas and Iran following the news that 6 Israeli hostages were executed shortly before their bodies were discovered by the IDF in Gaza.
“An execution is crossing a red line, a shocking war crime by a murderous terrorist organization,” he wrote.
Katz added, “Israel demands the international community categorically condemn the heinous murder of the six hostages and take all possible measures, including sanctions and legal measures, against Hamas and its supporters, led by Iran. ”
He instructed embassies to “immediately contact your high-ranking partners in your places of residence, and pass on the information and messages.”
Katz said Hamas’s execution of the hostages was not only an inhumane act that crossed a red line, but was part of its overall ideology to destroy the Jewish state.
He wrote, “This is the crossing of a red line, a shocking war crime by a murderous terrorist organization that seeks to implement an extreme ideology that strives to destroy the State of Israel.”
Katz added that it was necessary to sanction Iran, which funded and armed Hamas terrorists and is behind Hamas and other proxy groups such as the Houthis and Hezbollah.
He wrote, “Iran is the head of the snake. Iran finances, trains, arms, and directs its proxies Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen.”