For the USA he is a financier of Hamas, but Mohammad Hannoun, the architect who lives in Genoa, claims he wants to help the Palestinian people

He lives in Genoa and for years has been organizing fundraisers in support of the Palestinian people. Mohammad Hannoun, the architect who the US Treasury Department has subjected to sanctions because he was considered a financier of Hamas through the Charity Association of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, or Charitable Association of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (Abspp).

For Hannoun it is not the first time. In the past he has already been involved, with bank accounts blocked, in investigations always linked to the same reason, the so-called gray zone in which funds collected in Italy and other European countries to help the Palestinian population would actually end up in the coffers of Hamas .

The last time it happened in July 2023. The Italian authorities had acted on reports from the Israeli Shin Bet intelligence services. At stake was around one million euros divided between Italy, Germany and the United States.

Even earlier, the Genoa prosecutor’s office had accused him of supporting Palestinian terrorist groups but everything ended with nothing.

Hannoun would be the head of a sort of confederation of associations created with the aim of helping the Palestinian people.

At the end of 2021, after a series of reports to the Anti-Money Laundering Office, a credit institution had suspended operations on the accounts of the association (which in addition to Genoa also has offices in Milan and Rome) due to a series of anomalies: failure to register of the association to the Revenue Agency register and the massive movement of cash in some cases to subjects included in the blacklists of European databases. However, this did not prevent Hannoun – who yesterday preferred not to answer Repubblica’s questions – from continuing to carry out his activities, also meeting a series of Italian parliamentarians and politicians. Always very close to some 5 Star deputies – he was also received by the former undersecretary Manlio di Stefano while he was organizing Friday prayers with Sheykh Riyad Al Bustanji, one of the most radical preachers of Islam – in recent archives a trip organized in January appears with Alessandro Di Battista and the deputy and leader of the 5 Star group in the anti-terrorism commission Stefania Ascari, to visit the Palestinian refugee camps. The object of the visit was the distribution of food parcels, school supplies, clothing and medicines, which are, at least according to the declarations, the center of the activity of the Hannoun association. Di Battista was also in the Ein el Hilweh refugee camp which, according to various intelligence reports, is a base for the Asbat an-Ansar terrorists.

Hannoun, who was assisted in these events by the lawyer Dario Rossi, has always rejected the accusations, claiming that he only wanted to help the Palestinian people. The investigations have always stopped upon arrival in Palestine when it is very difficult to clearly understand who manages the solidarity funds, whether independent and secular associations or structures in some way linked to Hamas which operated in Palestine, at least until before the bombings. over Gaza, a widespread and deeply rooted control.

In 2021, in a post on Facebook in which he addressed parliamentarian Luisa Morgantini to harshly criticize the figure of Abu Mazen, former PLO and president of the Palestinian National Authority, Hannoun said this about Hamas: “The polls speak clearly, Hamas is a party that was democratically elected in Palestine, and represents a large majority of Palestinians. And this is what matters, the parties must first satisfy the needs of the people they belong to, and then, perhaps, of the rest of the world.”