US Treasury Sanctions Mount Hebron Fund and Shlom Asiraich for Supporting Violent Extremists in West Bank

TFD – Delve into the recent developments surrounding US Treasury sanctions on Mount Hebron Fund and Shlom Asiraich for their support of violent extremists in the West Bank. Gain insights into the crowdfunding campaigns and individuals targeted by these sanctions. Stay informed about the efforts to address violence in the region and the impact of these sanctions on Israeli radical groups.

Sanctions were imposed on Friday by the US Treasury Department on two groups that had raised money for two radical Israelis who were violent in the West Bank.

Mount Hebron Fund and Shlom Asiraich launched crowdfunding campaigns in order to raise thousands of dollars for David Chai Chasdai and Yinon Levi, respectively. Under a recent executive order that targeted individuals committing acts of violence in the West Bank, the US imposed sanctions on both of those men in February.

Ben-Zion Gopstein, “the founder and leader of Lehava, an organization whose members have engaged in violence, including assaults on Palestinian civilians,” was also sanctioned by the State Department on Friday, according to a statement released by the Treasury Department on the same day.

President Joe Biden issued the executive order in the first part of February, following a spike in violence in the occupied West Bank following the terrorist incident on October 7. The following months have only seen more of the same brutality. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was incensed by the directive and complained to the administration, characterizing it as “inappropriate” and “highly problematic,” as Axios reports.

The goal of the Mount Hebron Fund is to raise money for Levi’s family by crowdsourcing and circumventing sanctions. According to the State Department, Levi is a teenage settler who frequently leads roving parties of West Bank Israelis that attack Palestinians, set fire to their fields, and destroy their property.

Screenshots of the now-deleted crowdfunding page indicate that Levi and his family are trying to raise nearly $130,000, or half a million shekels. After the website stated its goal to circumvent US sanctions against Levi, contributions flooded in from 3,000 contributors worldwide, raising more than $140,000 before the page was taken down, according to the Associated Press.

For Chasdai, who “initiated and led a riot, which involved setting vehicles and buildings on fire, assaulting Palestinian civilians, and causing damage to property in Huwara, which resulted in the death of a Palestinian civilian,” according to the US Treasury, Shlom Asir set up a crowdfunding campaign that raised about $31,000. That fundraiser was also started following the US sanctions against Chasdai.

Furthermore, Shlom Asiraich “has also raised funds for other imprisoned violent extremists who share the group’s ideology, such as Amiram Ben Uliel, who was found guilty in 2020 of killing a Palestinian couple and their baby in an arson attack in the West Bank village of Duma in 2015, and Yigal Amir, who assassinated former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.