War in Israel: Swiss justice investigates Hamas financing

Perpetrators of attacks on Israel are carefully vetted. Swiss justice has been investigating possible Swiss funding for Hamas for weeks, although Bern does not classify the organization as terrorist, the prosecutor general said on radio on Saturday.

The investigation was launched “several weeks” before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, Stefan Blattler told Swiss public radio SRF, without providing further details.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPC, General Prosecutor’s Office) then clarified that the investigation was focused “on suspicions of Hamas financing from Switzerland.” The investigation promises to be painstaking, since, unlike the EU and the US, Switzerland has not yet banned Hamas.

On the way to retraining Hamas in Switzerland

However, since October 7, there have been increasing calls in Switzerland for the Federal Council (government) to take a decisive step, forcing it to take up the issue. Four days after the attacks, the Swiss government said it was “of the opinion that Hamas should be classified as a terrorist organization.”

It is the Middle East Task Force, created after the attacks, that is responsible for exploring options for classifying the Islamist organization as a terrorist group, but the government has given no timeline on this issue.

Two days after the attacks, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis said the government could only ban organizations that were also banned by the UN.

As a result, only al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, as well as a few associated organizations, are currently banned in Switzerland. All parliamentary attempts to ban Hamas have so far failed, but a lower house committee recently introduced a new proposal in this regard.

Hamas militants have killed more than 1,400 people in Israel since October 7, with most civilians mowed down by bullets, burned alive or dead from mutilation in the first day of an attack by Palestinian Islamist militants carried out from Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.

According to the Israeli military, about 1,500 Hamas militants were killed during the Israeli counteroffensive. Incessant bombardment carried out in response by the Israeli army has killed more than 4,300 people, mostly civilians, in the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.