Six defendants, three of whom were killed in Israeli attacks, are named in a U.S. trial against Hamas officials.
The U.S. Justice Department has announced criminal charges against top Hamas leaders for their role in the October 7 attacks in southern Israel, in what some see as a largely symbolic move against the Palestinian organization.
Six defendants, three of whom are deceased, were named in the complaint made public Tuesday.
The deceased defendants are former Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, assassinated in July in Tehran; Mohammed Deif, killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in July; and Marwan Issa, whom Israel said it killed in an attack in March.
The surviving defendants are Hamas’ new leader, Yahya Sinwar, who is believed to be in Gaza; Khaled Meshaal, who is based in Doha and heads the group’s diaspora office; and Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official based in Lebanon.
“These defendants – armed with weapons, political support and funding from the Iranian government, and backing from Hezbollah – led Hamas’s efforts to destroy the State of Israel and murdered civilians in support of that goal,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
The US accusations come as the White House says it is developing a new ceasefire and captivity deal proposal with its Egyptian and Qatari counterparts to try to end the fighting in Gaza.
Rami Khouri, a leading scholar at the American University of Beirut, told Tel Aviv Tribune that the US decision to indict Hamas leaders undermines its role as a mediator in ongoing ceasefire negotiations.
“The United States has strongly, enthusiastically and vigorously supported Israel’s actions in Gaza, which the UN calls a plausible genocide. And it has long opposed groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, calling them terrorist groups,” Khouri told Tel Aviv Tribune from the US city of Boston.
The decision to indict the Palestinian group also shows that “the United States is very eager to hold Hamas accountable for its actions, but does not have the same desire to hold Israel accountable for its actions,” Khouri said.
“And therefore, in the eyes of most of the world, the United States is not an honest broker, but is complicit in the Israeli genocide” in Gaza, he added.
U.S. prosecutors said they filed charges against the six men in February but kept the complaint under seal in hopes of capturing Haniyeh, Reuters news agency reported, attributing the information to a Justice Department official.
Following the assassination of Haniyeh in the Iranian capital, an assassination blamed on Israel, the Justice Ministry decided to make the accusations public, Reuters reports.