Since October 7, when Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 people in a single day, anti-Israel—and antisemitic—sentiment has roiled Europe. In the Netherlands, strangers have targeted Jewish people, calling them slurs like “child murderer” and “dirty Jew.” Over the summer, UK voters elected four anti-Israel politicians, all of whom consider the Jewish state’s retaliatory war against Hamas a “genocide”—with one even questioning reports that the terrorists raped their female victims.
On Tuesday, the European Leadership Network, a nonprofit pro-Israel advocacy group, released a report—first shared with The Free Press—that helps explain the origin of this rising hate. It states that an extensive network of Hamas-affiliated officials and activists throughout Europe use a “civilian front” of charities and nonprofits to line the pockets of the terrorist group.
The report, titled “Hamas in Europe,” identifies five European countries where it claims Hamas is most active outside of Gaza: the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Its hundreds of pages detail the histories of at least a dozen individuals with Hamas ties who are living in Europe while they fundraise, lobby for, and make media appearances on behalf of the terrorist group.
Here are just three individuals highlighted in the report.
Mohammad Hannoun, a 62-year-old Jordan native who the report describes as “the epicenter of Italian actors operating or sympathizing with Hamas,” has sent at least $4 million to the terrorist group over the past decade via the Charity Association of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The U.S. Treasury Department recently said the Italy-based organization, which Hannoun founded in 1994, “ostensibly raises funds for humanitarian purposes, but in reality helps bankroll Hamas’s military wing.” Just three days after October 7 of last year, Hannoun told an Italian journalist that Hamas’s invasion of Israel was “self-defense.” Hannoun, who lives in the northern Italian city of Genoa, has helped promote anti-Israel rallies throughout the Mediterranean country on his Facebook page, often posting about what he calls a “Nazi Zionist genocide in Palestine.”
Majed Al-Zeer, who has been co-designated as a Hamas operative by the U.S. and Israel, is “the mastermind of the Hamas-affiliated activity” in the UK and Germany, according to the report. In 1996, Al-Zeer, a 62-year-old British-Jordanian citizen, founded the Palestinian Return Centre, which lobbies British Parliament and holds a special status at the UN that allows its members to attend meetings and “mobilize support for the Palestinian cause in the UK and overseas.” In 2010, Israel declared the Palestinian Return Centre an “unlawful association,” stating that “it is part of the Hamas movement.” Even though German authorities have identified the Palestinian Return Centre as a likely front for Hamas activity, Al-Zeer continues to live and organize anti-Israel rallies in Berlin, where he moved from the UK in 2014.
Amin Abou Rashed, who Dutch authorities arrested last year for allegedly sending about $6 million to Hamas, has a pattern of “hiding behind politics” and “alleged humanitarian efforts” to “promote Hamas’s ideology” through purported charities like the now-defunct Al-Aqsa Foundation. According to the report, Rashed gained asylum to the Netherlands in 1992, and has been pictured with now-deceased Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and other officials for the terrorist group.
The European Leadership Network was able to link these charities and individuals to Hamas through publicly available information such as social media posts and nonprofit registration filings. Mark Sachs, a U.S.-based director of the European Leadership Network, told me “most of the world has absolutely no idea what is taking place right beneath their noses.”
“It is essential that we in the West start to wake up to how deeply embedded this infrastructure is and how sophisticated Hamas is in taking advantage of the West,” Sachs said.
U.S. regulators have estimated that since early 2024, Hamas has received as much as $10 million a month from these fraudulent groups, most of which are located in Europe, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
“Hamas has exploited the suffering in Gaza to solicit funds through sham and front charities that falsely claim to help civilians in Gaza,” the U.S. Treasury Department said last week. “Hamas considers Europe to be a key source of fundraising and has maintained representation across the continent for many years in part to raise funds through sham charities.”
To Sachs, the report’s findings are proof that Hamas’s tentacles have spread far beyond the Middle East.
“A lot of Americans tend to look at Hamas and think that because they’re primarily in Gaza, this is an isolated and backward group of individuals,” said Sachs, a former director of AIPAC, America’s largest pro-Israel lobbying group. “It’s anything but—it’s sophisticated, it’s global, and they have operatives throughout Europe and the United States actively working against the West’s interests.”
“Like other European countries, Italy has also served as a convenient platform for fundraising, lobbying, and providing indirect support to Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood–related activity for decades due to insufficient responses and enforcement from European and local authorities,” the report states.
The U.S. has joined its European counterparts in cracking down on Hamas operatives, most recently announcing on the anniversary of October 7 that it would sanction both Hannoun and Al-Zeer as well as the Charity Association of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which it called a “sham charity.”
The European Leadership Network report shows how the five countries in Europe have allowed Hamas-linked groups to dissolve once they’re hit with a terrorist designation and reorganize under the same leadership with a new name. One example is Charity Association of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which sprang from the Union of Good—a coalition of charities that U.S. regulators said “support Hamas members and the families of terrorist operatives” after freezing their assets in 2008.
“They have innocuous-sounding names,” Sachs said of the network of nonprofits. “But these are Hamas enterprises.”
Olivia Reingold is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on X @Olivia_Reingold and watch our documentary, “American Miseducation,” in which she details rising anti-Israel hatred on college campuses.
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