FBI said questioning Oct. 7 victims for case against financial backers of Hamas
US Justice Department declines to comment on potential case, but Bloomberg says survivors and their families provided materials to the US agency
FBI agents have taken testimonies from the survivors and relatives of victims of the October 7 massacre in southern Israel as the US Justice Department builds a case against financial backers of the Hamas terror group, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The case is targeting avenues of support to the Hamas terror group, including funding from Qatar and Iran, sources familiar with the investigation told Bloomberg.
According to the report, former hostages and the families of US citizens murdered during the devastating onslaught have provided footage and texts from those slain in order to create a detailed chronology of the massacre and identify its perpetrators.
A spokesperson for the US Justice Department declined to comment on the report.
Iran was one of the first countries to hail the Hamas assault and is known to fund and support terrorist organizations in the area including Hamas and Hezbollah.
An intelligence report released by US and Israeli intelligence professionals in April said that “Qatari funding and policies led directly to October 7.”
Last week, the Anti-Defamation League filed a lawsuit in a federal court in New York on behalf of October 7 victims against Iran, Syria and North Korea, accusing the countries of funding and arming Hamas and thus enabling the terrorist organization to carry out the attack.
While the lawsuit does not provide evidence that any of the countries knew of the attack in advance, it seeks to prove that they provided weapons, technology and financial support for it.
The United States has deemed Iran, Syria and North Korea to be state sponsors of terrorism, and Washington has designated Hamas as a “specially designated global terrorist.”
In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that 500 Palestinian terrorists underwent “specialized combat training” in Iran weeks before the group’s murderous onslaught against Israel. In January, Israel released a video of a captured member of the Hamas-allied Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group testifying that he was trained in Iran, arriving there after a stopover in Syria.
In another lawsuit related to October 7, Israelis who were taken hostage or lost loved ones during Hamas’s attack sued the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees for $1 billion last month, claiming it has helped finance the terrorists by paying agency staffers in US dollars and thereby funneling them to money-changers in Gaza who allegedly give a cut to Hamas.
It also said UNRWA, which coordinates nearly all aid to Gaza, let Hamas use its facilities for weapons storage, and allowed tunnels and command centers to be built under its sites.
The agency has denied that it knowingly aided Hamas or any other terror group.
Thousands of Hamas terrorists broke through Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip on October 7, brutally attacking communities close by. During the attack, some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were murdered, and 251 were taken hostage.
Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza in response with the proclaimed objectives of dismantling the terrorist organization that rules the Strip and getting the hostages back.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 38,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told the Knesset on Wednesday that the IDF has killed 60% of Hamas terrorists during the war. This includes some 1,000 terrorists the army said it killed in Israel on October 7.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 326.
The Times of Israel Community.