84 allegedly Hamas-connected crypto addresses seized by Israel – report
Israeli Minister of Defence, Benjamin Gantz, signed an order for the seizure of crypto wallets that they have alleged belong to Hamas operatives on Monday
Bitcoin, Tether, Ether and Dogecoin were all listed in the 84 addresses, most of which are connected to seven Palestinian nationals associated with Hamas, according to the National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing. A number of the wallets, however, remain anonymous, The Block reported.
Elliptic, a blockchain analytics and forensics firm, found that $7.7 million in cryptocurrency transactions took place.
“Some of the addresses are part of larger services and not all of these funds may be associated with terrorism. When calculating this figure we excluded funds sent to addresses known to be used by services such as exchanges to receive deposits from multiple users.”
According to the analytics company’s Co-Founder, Tom Robinson, “some of the wallets are still active. A number of them are deposit addresses at exchanges, whilst others belong to brokers.” Although he did mention that some wallets are self-hosted. On whether Elliptic had worked with the Israeli government on tracing the wallets, Robinson remained silent, including a refusal to name the exchanges identified.
To the point of outside ownership, the Ministry of Defense’s order says: “Any individual who claims ownership of any or all of The Property, may make their claims and submit them in writing to the Head of the National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing.”
An Israeli NGO has previously identified Hamas’ use of Coinbase in the past, and the US Department of Defense and Department of Justice had also conducted a similar seizure.
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