U.S. Charges Hamas Leaders in Oct. 7 Massacre in Israel and Other Terrorist Attacks
Federal prosecutors charged Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and five senior members of the group with planning and carrying out years of terrorist attacks in Israel, including the Oct. 7 massacre, according to a sweeping complaint unsealed on Tuesday.
The criminal complaint, originally filed in New York in February, implicated two other senior members of Hamas not previously thought to be directly involved in the attacks. It also listed the number of Americans believed to have died at 43.
The other leaders named are Ismail Haniyeh, who had overseen Hamas’s political office in Qatar; Muhammad Deif, the commander of the group’s military wing; Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of the group’s military wing; Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut; and Khaled Meshal, a former political leader of the group who remains a top official. Mr. Deif and Mr. Issa were killed in Israeli airstrikes during the fighting in Gaza. Mr. Haniyeh, a top negotiator in cease-fire talks, was assassinated in Iran after a bomb was covertly smuggled into the guesthouse where he was staying.
Mr. Meshal, who resides in Qatar, and Mr. Haniyeh were not known to be involved in carrying out the Oct. 7 attacks. The two men, along with Mr. Barakeh, were all outside Gaza when the attacks happened, catching Israel by surprise. Mr. Haniyeh was living in Doha before his death.
American and Israeli intelligence believed the plans surrounding the attack were a closely guarded secret, known only by a select few inside Gaza like Mr. Sinwar and Mr. Deif. If true, the American government’s charges against the political members of Hamas could cast a different light on the group’s activities.
The charges come at a politically fraught moment as the White House tries to save cease-fire talks and after the disclosure over the weekend that Hamas executed six hostages in Gaza, including a 23-year-old Israeli-American whose death prompted an outpouring of grief across the United States.
The young man, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was among the roughly 250 who were taken on Oct. 7. He was badly wounded but thought to be alive before Hamas killed him. Seven more Americans remain in Gaza, but three are believed to have died either on Oct. 7 or shortly after. The other four are unaccounted for.
“We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of the brutal murders of Americans, as acts of terrorism,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement. “We will continue to support the whole-of-government effort to bring the Americans still being held hostage home.”
American officials have charged leaders of terrorist groups in the past even though they faced little chance of capture or arrest.
Among the seven counts the Hamas leaders face: conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens, conspiracy to finance terrorism, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction resulting in death and conspiracy to support terrorism resulting in death. Some of the counts date back to 1997.
The complaint is largely an accounting of Hamas’s violent history over the decades, including bombings in the 1990s that killed Americans, as well as statements made by the Hamas officials singled out in the complaint.
Hamas received funding through donations, cryptocurrency and transfers from the government of Iran, the complaint added.
The Justice Department said the charges were kept under seal after they were filed in February in the hopes of arresting Mr. Haniyeh and perhaps additional defendants, and to prevent them from going into hiding. But after Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination, the department decided there was no longer sufficient reason to keep the charges secret.
U.S. officials had also been gravely concerned that making the charges public would enrage Hamas and endanger Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s life. But his killing last week changed that calculus.
The United States designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization in October 1997 after a spate of bombings in Israel that killed scores of civilians, including women and children. The group’s charter calls for the destruction of Israel.
Mr. Sinwar and Mr. Deif were both deemed terrorists by the United States in 2015.
Mr. Sinwar has long been viewed as one of the militant group’s most influential leaders and is considered an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks. He became political chief of the group after Mr. Haniyeh’s killing in late July.
Born in a refugee camp in Gaza in 1962, he was raised by parents who, along with several hundred thousand other Palestinian Arabs, fled or were forced to flee during the wars surrounding the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Arrested by the Israeli authorities several times, Mr. Sinwar spent more than two decades in an Israeli prison until he was released in a prisoner exchange in 2011. After ascending through Hamas’s ranks, he was elected its leader in Gaza in 2017.
The Justice Department, in bringing criminal charges, cited the breadth of Hamas’s attacks in the complaint.
“Hamas and its leaders have continued to espouse the destruction of Israel as Hamas’s core purpose,” the complaint said, “and the use of murder and other acts of violent terrorism against Israelis and those who support Israel, including Americans, as its principal means of accomplishing that objective. As a central component of that mission, Hamas leaders have specifically called for retaliation against the United States in response to U.S. support of Israel’s existence.”
The International Criminal Court, in the Netherlands, has issued arrest warrants over the Israel-Gaza war, accusing both sides of war crimes. In May, it requested warrants for Mr. Haniyeh, Mr. Deif and Mr. Sinwar as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
In an Oct. 8, 2023, interview on Russia Today TV, Mr. Barakeh said that Hamas had been secretly planning the attack for two years.
“The zero hour was kept completely secret,” he said. “A limited number of Hamas leaders knew it. The number of people who knew about the attack and its timing could be counted on one hand.”