A Dutch court on Wednesday imposed a suspended sentence of six months’ imprisonment on a man prosecutors had said should be imprisoned for years for acting as a major financier of Hamas.
Amin Abou Rashed, who is widely believed to be a key fundraiser and financial officer for Hamas in Europe, received a far lighter sentence than the three years sought by the prosecution due to a bureaucratic error, De Telegraaf reported.
In 2003, authorities shuttered and added to the E.U. list of terror-related groups a charity he had used to funnel the funds, the Al Aqsa Foundation, according to the NOS broadcaster.
But in 2014, the organization was taken off that list, with the intention of dissolving the NGO. However, it was not dissolved due to an oversight, NOS reported. The prosecution charged Abou Rashed with operating a proscribed group when, in fact, the Al Aqsa Foundation was not proscribed, weakening the prosecution’s case in court, according to the report. He was convicted of trying to circumvent laws against funding Hamas using a different group, which he had set up in 2011.
Abou Rashed, who was seen helping to organize protest flotillas to Hamas-held Gaza and organizing celebrations celebrating Hamas, was arrested in 2023 and indicted for funding a terrorist group through the foundation.
The District Court of Rotterdam, in its ruling, determined that Abou Rashed, who had denied that he funded Hamas, knowingly did so despite “laws intended to ensure the security” of the Netherlands, De Telegraaf reported.
The prosecution said he has transferred millions of euros to Hamas over the years.
An error or turning a blind eye
Herman Loonstein, a prominent Dutch jurist, said the oversight required “an investigation into the apparent negligence of the prosecution service, if that’s what it is.”
This is needed, “First of all to determine whether this was an error or a deliberate turning of a blind eye, as we have seen in similar situations in the recent past, unfortunately,” Loonstein told JNS. Loonstein has criticized the fact that out of at least 122 identified alleged participants in the Nov. 8-9, 2024, riots against Jews and Israelis in Amsterdam, only 16 have been brought to trial.
The court also questioned the credibility of the prosecution’s expert witness, Ronald Sandee, whom the judge said was “politically or otherwise biased” and therefore his testimony should be taken “with caution.”
In the days leading up to the sentencing, the NRC Handelsblad newspaper, a major left-leaning publication accused of adopting a hostile editorial line toward Israel, published an exposé about Sandee that noted his past criticisms about the E.U. “retarded policy of letting in millions of Muslim asylum seekers” without screening, as the NRC quoted him as saying.
The newspaper also cited Sandee’s use of “dubious sources” in Israel, as NRC called them. NRC named the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, a prominent and influential think tank that was established in 2001 and is headed by Shlomo Mofaz, a reserves colonel in the Israel Defense Forces’ Intelligence Directorate.
Last year, NRC interviewed seven genocide scholars on whether Israel was committing this crime against humanity in Gaza. Some argued so, whereas others said that while Israel’s actions could be seen as genocidal, more evidence was needed to assert the allegation. The authors neglected to interview scholars from Israel’s Yad Vashem museum or the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which have both categorically and publicly denied the allegation.
Ronny Naftaniel, a former leader of Dutch Jewry, condemned the NRC for what he said was an attempt to influence the outcome of the trial due to NRC‘s anti-Israel policies. “If there’s anything dubious here [with the expert witness], it’s NRC‘s handling of his testimony,” Naftaniel said.
