Treasury Adds 5 Hamas-Linked Names After a $2M Crypto Trail From France

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control added five names to its sanctions list on Oct. 2. Two French charities, Association Baraka and Ensemble C Mieux, plus three individuals: Faouzi Barika, Amel Oualid and Saleem Abdallah Saleem al-Zaq. Treasury alleges Barika and Oualid sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto to al-Zaq, who the agency calls a Gaza-based deputy battalion commander in Hamas's military wing.

The pair and their organizations pulled in more than $2 million for Hamas between 2020 and 2026, according to Treasury. Notably, the agency didn't say all of it moved through digital assets. That gap is where the compliance work starts.

Any US-regulated exchange, custodian or payment processor now has to block property tied to these parties, deny access, and report it to OFAC within 10 business days, with annual filings after that. No requirement to convert frozen crypto into dollars. Custodians can leave the assets where they sit and just cut off access.

The 50% rule is the part compliance teams tend to underestimate. If a blocked person owns half or more of an entity, directly or indirectly, that entity is blocked too, even when it never shows up in a press release. Here's what matters: the five published names are a floor, not a ceiling.

Offshore venues aren't off the hook either. Treasury warned that foreign financial institutions could face secondary sanctions for knowingly handling significant transactions for designated parties. That's not a global freeze on every on-chain transfer. Enforcement still turns on jurisdiction, ownership and whether blocked property is actually involved. But the ambiguity is the point, and ambiguity is expensive.

The numbers tell the story, just not the one people expect. Two million dollars across six years is a rounding error against the compliance spend this triggers. Every exchange has to decide whether to rescreen historical exposure, trace shareholder structures, and build the audit trail proving they looked. That's real headcount, and it lands on firms that never touched a French charity.

Watch whether Treasury publishes wallet addresses next. That's the cost that actually bites.