Israeli security officials scored a major intelligence coup in 2018: secret documents that laid out, in intricate detail, what amounted to a private equity fund that Hamas used to finance its operations. The ledgers, pilfered from the computer of a senior Hamas official, listed assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hamas controlled mining, chicken farming, and road building companies in Sudan, twin skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, a property developer in Algeria, and a real estate firm listed on the Turkish stock exchange.
The documents, which The New York Times reviewed, were a potential road map for choking off Hamas’s money and thwarting its plans. The agents who obtained the records shared them inside their own government and in Washington. Nothing happened. For years, none of the companies named in the ledgers faced sanctions from the United States or Israel. Nobody publicly called out the companies or pressured Turkey, the hub of the financial network, to shut it down.
A Times investigation found that both senior Israeli and American officials failed to prioritize financial intelligence — which they had in hand — showing that tens of millions of dollars flowed from the companies to Hamas at the exact moment that it was buying new weapons and preparing an attack. That money, American, and Israeli officials now say, helped Hamas build up its military infrastructure and helped lay the groundwork for the Oct. 7 attacks.
“Everyone is talking about failures of intelligence on Oct. 7, but no one is talking about the failure to stop the money,” said Udi Levy, a former chief of Mossad’s economic warfare division. “It’s the money — the money — that allowed this.”
At its peak, Israeli and American officials now say, the portfolio had a value of roughly half a billion dollars. Even after the Treasury Department finally levied sanctions against the network in 2022, records show, Hamas-linked figures were able to obtain millions of dollars by selling shares in a blacklisted company. The Treasury Department now fears that such money flows will allow Hamas to finance its continuing war with Israel and to rebuild when it is over. “It’s something we are deeply worried about and expect to see given the financial stress Hamas is under,” said Brian Nelson, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. “What we are trying to do is disrupt that.”
That was what Israel’s terrorism-finance investigators hoped to do with their 2018 discovery. But at the top echelons of the Israeli and American governments, officials focused on putting together a series of financial sanctions against Iran. Neither country prioritized Hamas.
Israeli leaders believed that Hamas was more interested in governing than fighting. By the time the agents discovered the ledgers in 2018, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was encouraging the government of Qatar to deliver millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip. He gambled that the money would buy stability and peace. Mr. Levy recalled briefing Mr. Netanyahu personally in 2015 about the Hamas portfolio. “I can tell you for sure that I talked to him about this,” Mr. Levy said. “But he didn’t care that much about it.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s Mossad chief shut down Mr. Levy’s team, Task Force Harpoon, that focused on disrupting the money flowing to groups including Hamas. Former Harpoon agents grew so frustrated with the inaction that they uploaded some documents to Facebook, hoping that companies and investors would find them and stop doing business with Hamas-linked companies. In the years that followed the 2018 discovery, Hamas’s money network burrowed deeper into the mainstream financial system, records show.
The Turkish company at the heart of the operation had such a sheen of legitimacy that major American and European banks managed shares on behalf of clients. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invested tens of thousands of dollars before the company was placed under sanction. The Times reviewed previously undisclosed intelligence documents and corporate records and interviewed dozens of current officials from the United States, Israel, Turkey, and Hamas’s financial network. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
Israeli intelligence and security agencies have apologized for the failings that led up to the Oct. 7 attacks. Mr. Netanyahu has acknowledged that his government failed to protect its people and said that he would face, and answer, tough questions after the war. He has denied, though, that he took his eye off Hamas. But he declined to answer questions from The Times about the ledgers or the hunt for Hamas’s money.
2015: Task Force Harpoon
Israeli security and intelligence officials, working from a secure compound outside Tel Aviv, spent years tracking Hamas’s money. By 2015, they were on to what they called Hamas’s “secret investment portfolio.” Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State often use front companies to launder money. But here, Israeli agents saw something different, more ambitious: a multinational network of real businesses churning out real profits. On paper, they looked like unrelated companies. But over and over, the Israelis said they identified the same Hamas-linked figures as shareholders, executives, and board members.
There were people like Hisham Qafisheh, a white-goateed Jordanian who studied in Saudi Arabia and had a knack for finding political support. One of his companies won a $500 million highway contract in Sudan. Then there was Amer Al-Shawa, a Turkish man of Palestinian descent who studied electrical engineering in Ohio and more recently spent five months under interrogation in an Emirati jail on suspicion of funding Hamas. At the top was Ahmed Odeh, a heavyset Jordanian businessman with years of experience in Saudi Arabia. The Israelis learned — and the Americans now say much of this publicly — that Hamas’s governing Shura Council had given Mr. Odeh seed money to build and manage a portfolio of companies. Hamas, the de facto governing body of Gaza, relied principally on Iran to fund its military wing. But Hamas wanted its own funding stream, too.
The Israeli security services operated a terrorism-finance investigative team at the time called Task Force Harpoon. It put people from across counterterrorism — spies, soldiers, police officers, accountants, lawyers — under the same umbrella and gave them a direct report to the prime minister. The task force even had an economic warfare unit within the Mossad intelligence agency that could covertly act on the intelligence it had gathered. “We didn’t have any rivalries,” Tamir Pardo, the Mossad chief at the time, said in an interview. “No one got credit for any one operation. It just worked.” Harpoon, he said, was “one of the most important tools the Mossad had.” It churned out intelligence to financial regulators, law enforcement agencies, politicians, and allies in Washington, helping Israel win financial sanctions targeting Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah.
Mr. Levy, who ran Harpoon and its dedicated economic warfare unit, recalled the first time he heard about Hamas’s portfolio. “One of the guys on my team, a Mossad guy, showed it to me,” Mr. Levy said. “What we understood then was that they had these companies to make a little bit of money and to use them as a legal platform to transfer money from place to place.” Back then, the consensus among Israeli officials was that Iran was the bigger threat. It had nuclear ambitions and armed both Hamas and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. So the bulk of the task force’s attention remained focused there. Still, Mr. Levy said the discovery was enough of a “red flag” that he told Mr. Netanyahu about it.
2016: Shut Down
A 2014 war between Israel and Hamas had left Hamas’s fortifications in ruins and its arsenal depleted. Hamas, though, was able to rebuild. In 2016, Israeli intelligence officials noted that the group was obtaining GPS jammers, drones and precision weapons, according to a military document reviewed by The Times. Hamas had added about 6,000 operatives to its ranks since the war ended, and the military had learned that Hamas was developing plans to storm Israeli communities and take hostages.
By 2016, Mr. Netanyahu’s government had begun pursuing a strategy to contain Hamas by allowing the Qataris to send money to Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu says that money was humanitarian aid. Privately, he told others that stabilizing Hamas would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state. That same year, the new Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, dismantled Harpoon as part of an agency reorganization, according to Mr. Levy and others. Mr. Levy left government that year. A new group of intelligence agents and specialists from a few other agencies kept chasing the money, only without the same authority and ability to command the broader government.