Italy finally arrests Hamas’s best friend in Rome

For three decades, Mohammad Hannoun operated with the impunity of a man who understood that Italian bureaucracy moves slower than glacial drift. The Palestinian architect from Ramallah built an empire of sham charities in Genoa while posing for photographs with Hamas chieftains Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashal. This week, the glacier finally calved. Italian anti-terrorism police arrested Hannoun and eight associates, seizing over eight million euros and exposing what investigators describe as a full-fledged Hamas cell operating on European soil since the early 1990s.

The Facts of the Case

The Genoa District Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism Directorate accuses Hannoun of channeling approximately eight million euros to Hamas over two decades through a network of ostensibly charitable organizations. The principal vehicle was the Associazione Benefica di Solidarietà con il Popolo Palestinese, ABSPP, which Hannoun co-founded in 1994. Investigators allege that more than 71 percent of funds collected under humanitarian pretenses flowed directly to Hamas or its controlled entities, including payments to families of suicide bombers and imprisoned terrorists.

The operation, coordinated with Dutch authorities and Eurojust, identified Hannoun as a senior member of Hamas’s foreign branch and leader of its Italian cell. Among the co-defendants is Osama Alisawi, a former Hamas minister in Gaza who allegedly received direct transfers and specifically solicited financial support. The charities named in the indictment include ABSPP and its offspring, Associazione Benefica La Cupola d’Oro, the “Golden Dome,” created after Unicredit Bank froze ABSPP’s accounts in 2021 following suspicious transaction reports.

A Case Study in Institutional Paralysis

The most damning aspect of the Hannoun affair is not that he operated so brazenly for so long. It is that everyone who mattered knew exactly what he was doing. TheUS Treasury Department sanctioned him in October 2024, designating him a Hamas member who bankrolled the organization’s military wing. The Israeli Shin Bet had been tracking him for years; in 2023, the Israeli Defense Ministry formally requested that Italian police seize five hundred thousand euros from his accounts, funds characterized as property of a terrorist organization. Italy did nothing.

Analyst Giovanni Giacalone, who monitored Hannoun’s activities for years through open-source intelligence, told Italian media that his reports prompted belated inspections but no meaningful action. Hannoun himself seemed to grasp the absurdity of his situation. After the US sanctions closed his banking access, he simply asked donors to bring cash directly to his offices in Genoa, Milan, and Rome. When that proved cumbersome, he created new shell organizations with fresh bank accounts. The chutzpah was breathtaking; the oversight was nonexistent.

Three days after the October 7 massacre, Hannoun appeared on Italian state television to declare that Hamas’s attack was self-defense. He subsequently glorified Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’s master bombmaker, and praised the Amsterdam pogrom against Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters. In October 2025, he led demonstrators in chants endorsing the execution of collaborators. At no point did Italian authorities consider these statements grounds for intervention.

The Political Dimension

Here lies the rot. Hannoun did not operate in isolation. He cultivated relationships across Italian politics, appearing alongside figures from the Five Star Movement, Democratic Party MPs, and most notably, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who shared a stage with his deputy Sulaiman Hijazi. These associations provided political cover and social legitimacy to a man the US government had identified as a terrorist financier.

The prosecutor’s statement announcing the arrests contains a peculiar insertion that reveals the ideological confusion still plaguing Italian institutions. It includes an aside noting that the investigation cannot in any way diminish the significance of crimes committed against the Palestinian population after October 7, 2023. Verbatim.

This disclaimer, juridically irrelevant and investigatively meaningless, suggests that even in the act of arresting Hamas operatives, Italian prosecutors felt compelled to genuflect toward fashionable political narratives. One does not find similar disclaimers in indictments of ISIS financiers.

What This Means for Europe

Hannoun’s network was not exclusively Italian. The investigation revealed coordination with similar Hamas-linked organizations in the Netherlands, Austria, France, and the United Kingdom. The same pattern repeats across the continent: charitable facades, complex financial triangulations, political protection, and bureaucratic lethargy. Hamas exploited European liberalism with surgical precision, understanding that democracies move slowly and that accusations of Islamophobia provide excellent defensive cover.

The arrests in Genoa should mark a turning point. They demonstrate that the evidence trails exist and that prosecutions are possible when political will materializes. The US Treasury did the heavy lifting; Italian investigators followed the roadmap. Other European nations should take note.

An Arrest with a Disclaimer

For decades, Western security services have understood that terrorism requires money and that money leaves traces. Hannoun’s operation succeeded because Italian institutions preferred not to follow those traces to their obvious conclusions. The political class enjoyed his company; the charities provided humanitarian theater; and meanwhile, euros flowed to an organization responsible for the murder of nearly five hundred people in attacks predating October 7 and 1,200 more in a single day of slaughter.

Italy has finally acted. The question now is whether this represents genuine awakening or merely an embarrassed reaction to American pressure. The presence of that exculpatory clause in the prosecutor’s statement suggests the latter. Real commitment to counterterrorism does not require apologetic footnotes.