Plus, Poland’s role in the Holocaust relitigated
JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images
Former Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao (C) departs federal court in Seattle, Washington, on April 30, 2024. Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former chief executive of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, was sentenced today to four months in prison after he pleaded guilty to violating laws against money laundering.
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A new federal lawsuit filed on behalf of families of victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks accuses the crypto giant Binance of knowingly facilitating the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to U.S.-designated foreign terror organizations on an “industrial scale,” Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. The family members allege that Binance’s actions helped contribute to the deadly incursion in Israel that killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages…
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — the controversial U.S.- and Israel-backed aid mechanism launched earlier this year to provide humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza from a source other than the United Nations — announced on Monday that it would shut down. GHF said in a statement that it had distributed 187 million meals, marking a “successful completion of its emergency mission”…
Thomas Rose, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, delivered an address last week saying claims that Poland was complicit in Nazis’ crimes against Jews in the country during the Holocaust are a “grotesque falsehood,” which he likened to a “blood libel against the Polish people and Polish nation,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports. The remarks from Rose, a former publisher of The Jerusalem Post, have reignited a heated debate about whether Poland bears responsibility for the country’s treatment of Jews during World War II — or if the country had itself fallen victim to the Nazis…
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An ongoing public dispute between Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir about investigations over military failures around Oct. 7 continued on Monday, leading Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reportedly invite the two for a private meeting with the goal of resolving the feud…
The Gaza terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad said on Monday that it had “found” the body of another deceased Israeli hostage, though the group did not publicly indicate if or when it plans to hand over the body — one of three remaining in the Gaza Strip…
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Among the 306 American plaintiffs are the families of Israeli Americans Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Itay Chen
Singapore Press via AP Images
Binance founder and CEO Zhao Changpeng on July 12, 2021.
A new federal lawsuit filed on behalf of families of victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks accuses the crypto giant Binance of knowingly facilitating the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to U.S.-designated foreign terror organizations on an “industrial scale,” helping contribute to the deadly incursion in Israel that killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.
According to the complaint, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, “deliberately” failed “to monitor inbound funds” to such terror groups as Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ensuring “that terrorists and other criminals could deposit and shuffle enormous sums on the exchange with impunity.”
“Moreover, when specific customers were designated or particular accounts were subject to seizure orders, Binance allowed those customers and accounts to shift the assets into other Binance accounts, thus negating the effect of any ‘blocking’ or ‘seizing’ of the account,” the complaint states.
Such a policy “demonstrates Binance’s deliberate and conscious effort to enable users to operate on the Binance platform and clearly helps facilitate financial crime on an industrial scale,” the filing adds.
Among the 306 American plaintiffs are the families of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage murdered by Hamas in Gaza; Itay Chen, an Israeli-American IDF soldier whose body was returned to Israel this month; Eyal Waldman, an Israeli philanthropist whose U.S.-born daughter, Danielle, was killed at the Nova music festival during the Oct. 7 attacks; and Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.
“The lawsuit details how Binance knowingly facilitated the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars between 2021 and 2023 that helped enable the terrorist organizations responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks,” Gary Osen, an attorney representing the plaintiffs who specializes in civil terror cases, said in a statement to Jewish Insider. “One of our goals is to cast a public spotlight on specific ways in which the Binance platform has been used by Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas to finance terrorism.”
The 284-page complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota under the Anti-Terrorism Act, targets Binance as well as its founder and former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, and Guangying Chen, a close associate of Zhao whom the lawsuit identifies as the crypto exchange’s “de facto chief financial officer.”
Zhao and Chen could not be reached for comment regarding the lawsuit.
A Binance spokesperson said the company “cannot comment on any ongoing litigation.”
“However, as a global crypto exchange, we comply fully with internationally recognized sanctions laws, consistent with other financial institutions. For context, the heads of the U.S.Treasury’s FinCEN and OFAC have confirmed that cryptocurrency is not widely used by Hamas terrorists,” the spokesperson told JI in a statement, referring to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Office of Foreign Assets Control. “Most importantly, we hope for lasting peace in the region.”
The company’s “conduct was far more serious and pervasive than what the U.S. government disclosed during its 2023 criminal enforcement actions,” the complaint says, claiming that Binance “knowingly sent and received the equivalent of more than $1 billion to and from accounts and wallets controlled by the FTOs responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks.”
That figure, the filing states, vastly outnumbers a previous amount of more than $2,000 in known transactions for Hamas disclosed by the federal government in 2023.
In November 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to money laundering charges and agreed to step down from his executive role. He served four months in federal prison and was pardoned last month by President Donald Trump. Binance itself also pleaded guilty to federal charges and paid over $4 billion in fines.
Last May, Binance participated in a $2 billion business deal with World Liberty Financial, a new crypto company founded by the families of Trump and Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy.
“To this day,” the complaint states, “there is no indication that Binance has meaningfully altered its core business model.”
Citing a complex forensic money laundering analysis, the lawsuit identifies a wide range of Binance accounts with alleged terror links and spanning multiple locales, including Venezuela, Gaza, Lebanon and even North Dakota, where an account connected to Hamas was accessed several times from a small city outside Fargo.
The suit refers to Gaza money exchanges, a gold smuggling operation in South America with ties to Hezbollah and a purported Venezuelan livestock entrepreneur allegedly moving millions of dollars for known terror organizations in the Middle East, among other illicit transactions.
“Every tunnel, every missile, every bullet, every attack is paid for by someone,” Izhar Shay, a plaintiff whose son Yaron died defending Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in Israel on Oct. 7, said in a statement shared with JI. “Companies like Binance cannot keep profiting if they enable terrorists to operate in the shadows. This case is about making sure that those who enabled Hamas’ evil are held to account.”