Israel eliminated Muhammad Abu Alwan, identified as Hamas’s finance chief, in an airstrike this week in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. While the death of another senior Hamas operative in Gaza is an important achievement in the campaign against the terrorist organization, there is a much larger story contained in the announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz.
They did not merely promise to continue hunting Hamas commanders and operatives; they specifically pledged to “target [Hamas’s] sources of funding” and destroy its terrorist infrastructure.
That language should receive far more attention than it has. After more than two decades of representing victims of terrorism and pursuing terrorist organizations and their financial enablers through the courts, I have learned that the most important terrorist is not always the man carrying the weapon or issuing the order. Sometimes, it is the person sitting behind a desk moving the money, because he makes the entire operation possible.
Hamas can replace a finance chief, just as it can replace a military commander, a rocket engineer or a terrorist killed on the battlefield. But replacing an entire financial infrastructure is considerably more difficult when banks, money changers, front companies, charities, cryptocurrency channels and other intermediaries that move the money are identified and forced to confront the legal and financial consequences of facilitating terrorism.
This is a lesson Israel understood years ago.
During the tenure of the legendary Mossad Director Meir Dagan in the early 2000s, Israel developed an aggressive approach to terrorist financing that became associated with the Harpoon unit. Its mission was to identify and disrupt the financial networks sustaining terrorist organizations and their supporters, because Israeli intelligence understood that eliminating individual terrorists without attacking the infrastructure that recruits, equips and finances them could never be sufficient to defeat the organizations themselves. Harpoon’s motto was: “Follow the money, target the money, kill the money.”
I have spent much of my career fighting that same war on a different battlefield.
At our Shurat HaDin Law Center, we have taken terrorist organizations, their financiers and financial facilitators to court, because terrorism does not exist in a vacuum. It depends upon an economic infrastructure that allows terrorists to pay salaries, purchase weapons, construct tunnels, move operatives, maintain communications, recruit supporters and rebuild after military losses.
The courtroom therefore can become another battlefield in the war against terrorism, particularly when the objective is not merely to punish someone after an attack but to identify the financial system that allowed the attack to happen in the first place.
That is why today’s announcement should prompt a much larger set of questions than simply who Abu Alwan was and how he was eliminated: Who financed him, and who financed the people who financed him? Which banks processed the transactions, which money changers moved the funds, which companies concealed their origins, which intermediaries transferred Iranian money into Hamas’s network, and which individuals knowingly provided the financial infrastructure that allowed Hamas to continue operating?
The war against terrorism cannot end when the shooting stops, because the financial networks that sustain terrorism do not disappear.
Those questions are critical because terrorist financing is rarely as simple as a suitcase of cash being handed from one terrorist to another. Modern terrorist organizations operate sophisticated financial networks that can stretch across borders and exploit legitimate businesses, charitable organizations, banking relationships, informal financial systems and increasingly sophisticated methods of moving money without immediately revealing the ultimate beneficiary.
Iran has spent years building precisely such networks for Hamas, Hezbollah and other terror proxies, and Washington has increasingly recognized that confronting those networks requires more than traditional diplomacy or military pressure.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s campaign against Iranian financial networks reflects an understanding that America’s extraordinary influence over the international monetary system can be used as a weapon against the infrastructure that generates revenue for the Iranian regime and supports its terrorist proxies. This is particularly true when sanctions and financial enforcement are directed not simply at a government in Tehran but at the companies, vessels, intermediaries and facilitators that actually move the money.
This is the natural evolution of the war on terror-financing that the State of Israel began years ago.
The United States possesses financial leverage on a scale that no other country can match, while Israel possesses extraordinary intelligence capabilities and a long history of identifying the people and networks behind terrorist financing. Organizations like Shurat HaDin bring another indispensable weapon to the fight by using civil litigation to pursue terrorist financiers and those who knowingly enable them.
These tools should not operate independently; they should reinforce one another.
When intelligence identifies a financial intermediary, sanctions should follow where legally justified, banks should know the risk they are being asked to assume, law enforcement should investigate the network and victims should have the ability to use the courts to pursue those responsible and seek recovery from assets connected to terrorism.
This is especially important because terrorist organizations are extraordinarily resilient when their financial infrastructure remains intact.
Kill one commander and another can take his place; destroy one weapons depot and another can be constructed; eliminate one finance chief and Hamas can appoint a successor; but if the financial institutions, companies, intermediaries and assets that sustain the organization are systematically identified and attacked through every available legal and financial mechanism, rebuilding becomes exponentially more difficult.
That is why I have always believed that the war against terrorism cannot end when the shooting stops, because the financial networks that sustain terrorism do not disappear when a battlefield operation is over.
The ultimate measure of success should not simply be how many terrorists are eliminated, but how effectively terrorist organizations are prevented from regenerating themselves. And that requires following the money long after the smoke has cleared.
The killing of Abu Alwan may have removed an important Hamas financier from the battlefield, but the more important question is what happens to the financial network he leaves behind. If we identify that network, expose its participants, freeze its assets and pursue those who knowingly enabled it, his death can become more than the elimination of another terrorist commander. It can become an opportunity to dismantle an entire financial ecosystem.
That is the real lesson of the war against Hamas. It is the lesson that Israel’s experience with Harpoon, Shurat HaDin’s decades of litigation and America’s growing campaign against Iranian financial networks should teach us.
Terrorist organizations do not live on ideology alone. They require money, and as long as the money continues to flow, there will always be someone willing and able to pick up the weapon left behind by the terrorist who was killed yesterday.
If we want to end the cycle rather than simply win the next battle, we have to attack the financial infrastructure that makes terrorism possible, because the only way to cut off the oxygen of terrorism is to cut off the money that sustains it.
