FBI Steps Up Its Scrutiny of Hamas Backers

The FBI has stepped up its scrutiny of Muslim militants in the United States who are raising funds for the Palestinian Hamas organization, and the State Department has decided to add the group to its official list of terrorist factions, officials said Monday.

The FBI has confirmed that Hamas supporters engage in fund-raising and propaganda activities in the United States but has found no evidence to support Israeli assertions that the group’s leadership exercises “command and control” from the Washington area, the officials added.

“There is fund-raising, propagandizing and publishing” in the United States, a State Department official said. “But the command and control of Hamas is still in the occupied territories,” meaning the Israeli-controlled West Bank and Gaza Strip, where 2 million Palestinian Arabs make up most of the population.

The FBI has been monitoring Hamas supporters’ activities in several areas, including Washington, Chicago, Detroit and Dallas, another official said.

It is not clear that any of the Hamas supporters’ activities in the United States are illegal, one official said. Raising money expressly for terrorist acts is against the law, but raising money for Hamas’ political or social programs is not.

Also Monday, officials said the State Department plans to label Hamas officially as a “terrorist organization” in its annual report on terrorism, to be released in April.

Both the FBI and State Department moves came largely in response to information supplied by the Israeli government indicating that Hamas is becoming increasingly violent, the officials said. But they added that the U.S. government began working on the issue several weeks ago, even before Israeli government officials began pressing publicly for more action.

In the wake of international condemnation of Israel’s deportation of 415 alleged Hamas militants to Lebanon in December, Israeli officials have been pointing to the organization’s record of violent acts and demanding more attention to their side of the problem.

Hamas is one of the most prominent of the militant Muslim organizations in the Middle East that want to see the Israeli state overthrown and replaced by a pan-Arab Islamic state. In the weeks before the mass deportation, Hamas claimed responsibility for a series of violent attacks on Israeli officials and civilians.

Some Israeli officials charged that Hamas’ political leadership was actually directing the organization from safehouses in the Washington area. But on Monday, an Israeli official in Washington amended that account, saying that only “part of the command and control was here in the United States, but there is a lot of fund-raising going on here.”

Both U.S. and Israeli officials said the FBI and State Department actions are not part of the agreement reached Monday under which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to take back 100 of the deportees in exchange for a U.S. promise to block U.N. sanctions against the Jewish state.

On Sunday, Israeli officials announced that they had detained two U.S. citizens of Palestinian origin and told reporters that the men had provided details of a multinational organization run from bases in the United States.

The two men, Mohammed Joma Hilmu Jarad, 36, of Chicago, and Mohammed Abdul Hamid Salah, 39, of Bridgeview, Ill., were seized by Israeli secret police Jan. 25. Israeli officials said that they have been interrogated extensively and have been visited by U.S. Embassy officials, but that they have not had access to a lawyer or appeared before a judge. Under Israeli military law, suspects may be held for two weeks without being charged.

According to reports in the Israeli press, the two men confessed to transferring $230,000 from a Chicago-area bank to a money-changer in the West Bank. They then gave $160,000 of the money to Hamas leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to the reports.