A 38-year-old San Diego man raised roughly $600,000 in online donations for Palestinian relief and allegedly sent a chunk of it directly to Hamas. Not metaphorically. Not ambiguously. To a Hamas member, and then through a Hamas-linked crypto operation that the Treasury Department later sanctioned. The charity was called the Arab Charity Foundation. The cause was real. The recipients, prosecutors say, were not.
What the Feds Are Actually Alleging Here
Reda Mazen Rida Sabassi was charged last month in a five-count federal complaint, according to the New York Post. Prosecutors say he ran an entity called Ikram, marketed as the Arab Charity Foundation Inc., out of San Diego, using it as the public face of what they describe as a terror financing operation wearing a humanitarian mask.
Between December 2023 and February 2024, the complaint alleges Sabassi raised approximately $600,000 through social media and crowdfunding platforms. Of that, prosecutors say he sent around $116,000 to a Hamas member and attempted to convert roughly $382,000 into cryptocurrency through Gaza Now, a fundraising operation the Treasury Department sanctioned for its ties to Hamas.
He also allegedly skimmed money for himself. So to summarize: donors gave to help Palestinians, Hamas got a cut, and Sabassi reportedly got a cut. The actual Palestinians in need got used as marketing material.
This Is Not a One-Off
Less than two weeks after the Sabassi charges, federal prosecutors in New York charged Catherine Beth Washburn, 37, of Irondequoit, with attempting to provide material support to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The New York Post reports Washburn is not accused of mistaking charity for politics. She is accused of trying to move money directly to a terrorist fighter.
Two cases, two weeks apart, two different terror groups. This is either an extraordinary coincidence or a sign that federal investigators have been watching this particular corner of the fundraising ecosystem very closely for a while now.
The Sabassi case, in particular, echoes something that was supposed to have been a lesson already learned. The New York Post points to the Holy Land Foundation case from two decades ago, when a federal judge sentenced foundation leaders after convictions for funneling approximately $12.4 million to Hamas disguised as charitable giving. One defendant, Mohammad El-Mezain, also of San Diego, received 15 years. The method is not new. The city is not new. The outcome may not be new either.
The Part That Should Make Donors Uncomfortable
Here is the uncomfortable thing nobody wants to say out loud: donors who gave to Sabassi's campaigns thought they were doing something good. They saw suffering in Gaza, they found a page with the right words on it, they clicked donate. That impulse is not shameful. The exploitation of it absolutely is.
The New York Post frames this well: question where the money is going and you get accused of hostility to humanitarian aid; look away and you risk becoming an unwitting fundraiser for a terror network. That is a genuine trap, and bad actors built it deliberately. The civilian suffering was real. The charity was allegedly the fiction layered on top of it to make the money move.
Real Palestinians in need had their misery turned into a financial instrument. That is the part of this story that should generate as much outrage as the Hamas connection.
So Who Failed to Catch This?
The alleged scheme did not require a weapons cache or a spy network. According to the New York Post's reporting, it required a charity name, a cause, a payment processor, and a crowdfunding platform willing to take the campaign at face value. That list of ingredients is available to basically anyone.
Crowdfunding platforms have the tools to verify organizers, flag suspicious overseas endpoints, and check linked wallets for known bad actors. Payment processors know they are not neutral infrastructure when their rails are moving money toward sanctioned entities. Crypto platforms, which the complaint suggests Sabassi leaned on heavily through Gaza Now, have spent years arguing they deserve to be treated like any other financial tool. Cases like this are exactly why that argument keeps losing.
Charity regulators, meanwhile, apparently waited for a federal indictment to surface what the New York Post's columnist argues should have been caught at the front end. None of these systems failed catastrophically. They just failed quietly, and that is almost worse.
What Verification Actually Looks Like
None of this means people should stop donating to Gaza relief efforts. It means they should stop donating to unknown operators running anonymous pages with no auditable trail and no verifiable beneficiaries. Those are not the same thing.
Legitimate organizations working in Gaza exist. They have 990 filings, established oversight structures, and institutional accountability. They are findable. They are verifiable. Clicking on a link someone shared on Instagram and entering your credit card number is not generosity, as the New York Post puts it plainly. It is exposure.
The next time someone shares a crowdfunding link for Palestinian aid and asks why you are asking questions about it, the answer is Ikram, Arab Charity Foundation Inc., $116,000 to a Hamas member, and a federal indictment. Questions are not hostility. They are the minimum.
The Dingo Take
The Sabassi case is going to get used as a cudgel by people who want to shut down all discussion of Palestinian suffering, all criticism of Israeli policy, and all donations to legitimate Gaza relief efforts. Watch for it. That is a completely predictable bad-faith move, and it should be rejected as loudly as the alleged fraud itself.
But rejecting that bad faith does not mean pretending the fraud did not happen. It happened. A man allegedly built a fake charity, raised six hundred thousand dollars from people who thought they were helping civilians, sent a significant portion of it to Hamas, and ran the whole operation through platforms that had every financial and technical tool available to stop it. The platforms did not stop it. The payment processors did not stop it. The crowdfunding sites did not stop it. A federal investigation eventually stopped it, which is a much slower and more expensive way to run a filter.
The Holy Land Foundation was prosecuted twenty years ago. The playbook has not changed. Charitable cover, real cause, fraudulent operator, terror beneficiary. At some point the platforms that keep hosting these campaigns without meaningful verification have to stop pretending they are passive pipes. They are not passive pipes. They are the mechanism. And right now, the mechanism keeps working exactly as the fraudsters need it to.
