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Federal prosecutors earlier this month charged Florida beauty supply merchant Raed Yousef, 56, with funneling tens of thousands of dollars to Hamas through a French organization that presented itself as a relief group.
In messages cited by investigators, Yousef also called for Jews to be slaughtered and beheaded, with their severed heads displayed to frighten others.
Yousef faces up to life in prison on 19 federal felony counts, including conspiracy, material support for terrorism, money laundering and passport fraud. The case marks at least the fifth U.S. investigation in the past year into alleged schemes that presented fundraising for terrorists in Gaza as humanitarian aid.
The funding network took shape days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel. Prosecutors said Yousef sent the French group more than $45,000 knowing the money was destined for Hamas, and that it moved over $330,000 in total to cryptocurrency accounts controlled by the terrorist organization.
Investigators said the conspirators disguised Hamas with the codewords “green” or “bread,” erased messages once read, and misled donors. “Just tell them these are needy people in Gaza,” Yousef told a co-conspirator in January 2024. “That would be better, because a lot of people will be afraid when you tell them.”
Other messages show Yousef calling for Jews to be killed and urging that beheadings be posted online “so they can be frightened.”
“They need to be slaughtered, to behead them and display their heads,” he said. “One would hold their heads, one in this hand and another head in the other hand and display their heads to frighten them so that they leave our land,” he added in Arabic.
His attorneys have cast those statements as protected political speech, maintaining that he believed the money was going to charity and had merely “provided a minuscule amount of money to someone he should not have.”
Inside Yousef’s home, authorities found $75,000 in cash, at least six firearms, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a “composition notebook for the Holy Land Foundation.” The self-described charity sent more than $12 million to Hamas from the 1990s into the early 2000s. The so-called Holy Land Five, imprisoned in the case, still command admiration in the anti-Zionist movement.
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