Puma to end kit deal with Israeli national football team

BERLIN, Germany -- German sportswear maker Puma said Tuesday it would end a sponsorship deal with the Israeli national football team in a decision made before the beginning of the war in Gaza.

Following a strategy review carried out at the end of 2022, Puma would stop outfitting the Israeli team from next year, the company said.

"While two newly signed national teams –- including a new statement team –- will be announced later this year and in 2024, the contracts of some federations such as Serbia and Israel will expire in 2024," a spokeswoman said in a statement.

"These decisions were taken in 2022 in line with the regular timelines for the design (and) development of the team jerseys," the spokeswoman said.

The deal with Israel, which was signed in 2018, prompted calls to boycott the sportswear brand.

Campaigners accused Puma of endorsing illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank through its deal with the Israeli FA, which includes teams from the occupied Palestinian territory.

The outbreak in October of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, has strengthened longstanding calls to boycott products which support Israel.

The war was triggered when Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip carried out an unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 240 hostages -- 137 of whom remain in Gaza, Israeli officials say.

In response, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and began intense bombardments and a ground offensive in Gaza that has killed at least 18,200 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Agence France-Presse

Terrorists turn to Bitcoin for funding, and they’re learning fast

SAN FRANCISCO -- Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, has been designated a terrorist organization by Western governments and some others and has been locked out of the traditional financial system. But this year, its military wing has developed an increasingly sophisticated campaign to raise money using Bitcoin.

In the latest version of the website set up by the wing, known as the Qassam Brigades, every visitor is given a unique Bitcoin address where he or she can send the digital currency, a method that makes the donations nearly impossible for law enforcement to track.

The site, which is available in 7 languages and features the brigades’ logo, with a green flag and a machine gun, contains a well-produced video that explains how to acquire and send Bitcoin without tipping off authorities.

Terrorists have been slow to join other criminal elements that have been drawn to Bitcoin and have used it for everything from drug purchases to money laundering.

But in recent months, government authorities and organizations that track terrorist financing have begun to raise alarms about an uptick in the number of Islamist terrorist organizations experimenting with Bitcoin and other digital coins.

The yields from individual campaigns appear to be modest — in the tens of thousands of dollars. But authorities note that terrorist attacks often require little funding. And the groups’ use of cryptocurrencies appears to be getting more sophisticated.

“You are going to see more of this,” said Yaya Fanusie, a former analyst with the CIA who now does consulting on rogue actors using cryptocurrencies. “This is going to be a part of the terrorist financing mix, and it is something that people should pay attention to.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has drawn attention to the issue in two speeches in recent months, calling for more active monitoring from cryptocurrency businesses.

“We are dedicating a lot of resources very specifically to this space,” Sigal Mandelker, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in an interview. “It is still relatively new to them, but I’m confident that we’re going to see more of it in the future.”

Cryptocurrencies are attractive to lawbreakers because they make it possible to hold and transfer money without a central authority, like PayPal, that can shut down accounts and freeze funds. Anyone in the world can create a Bitcoin address and begin receiving digital tokens without even providing a name or address.

The online markets where Bitcoin can buy drugs are hosting nearly $1 billion in commerce a year, even as authorities have shut down numerous leading markets.

Countries that are facing US economic sanctions, like Iran, Venezuela and Russia, have also taken steps toward creating their own cryptocurrencies to circumvent them.

Bitcoin has been slower to take off among terrorists in part because of its technical sophistication, terrorism experts said. Terrorist groups have also had methods of using the traditional financial system without needing Bitcoin.

Hamas, which controls the Palestinian coastal territory of Gaza, has traditionally survived on hundreds of millions of dollars of donations from foreign governments like Qatar. The Islamic State in Syria subsisted on taxes and fees it collected in the territories it controlled.

But both organizations have seen their access to money significantly curtailed. Israel maintains a strict blockade of Gaza, with Egypt’s help, and Hamas has been squeezed over the last year by financial cuts imposed by the rival, Western-backed Palestinian Authority. And the Islamic State group has lost most of its territory.

“They seem to be reacting to all the economic sanctions by saying, ‘We are going to try using Bitcoin,’” said Steven Stalinsky, executive director of Middle East Media Research Institute, a nonprofit that tracks and translates communication from terrorist groups.

Stalinsky’s organization, known as Memri, is about to publish a 253-page report about the increased signs of cryptocurrency use by terrorist organizations, particularly groups in Syria that are on the run as Islamic militants have lost almost all the territory they used to hold.

A leading sheikh with one of the biggest terrorist groups in Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, posted a long video to his online followers in July, explaining the origins of Bitcoin and declaring that it is permissible to use for charitable donations, according to a translation of the video by Memri.

A number of online researchers have recently discovered campaigns by Syrian militants that asked followers to send donations to Bitcoin addresses they posted on Telegram, a popular social network. One post, found by Raphael Gluck, an independent researcher, put the Bitcoin address under the picture of a man wearing camouflage and shooting a military-style rifle.

Signs that terrorists were using Bitcoin had been sporadic for several years. Fanusie, the former CIA analyst, drew public attention to a fundraising campaign begun in 2016 by the Mujahedeen Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem, a group based in Gaza that is designated a terrorist organization.

But the early efforts were clumsy. The Gaza campaign provided a single Bitcoin address, which made it easier for law enforcement to track where the money was coming from. The wallet advertised by the group took in only a few thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin.

When the Qassam Brigades began collecting money late last year, an Israeli research firm, Whitestream, determined that Hamas was keeping at least some of the money in wallets that were set up with American cryptocurrency company Coinbase.

Coinbase’s chief compliance officer, Jeff Horowitz, said that after tying the account to the Qassam Brigades, it immediately froze the account and reported it to US authorities.

An American man was arrested in May on accusations that he made small donations to the Qassam campaign and bragged about them on social media.

But the Qassam Brigades learned to cover their tracks. Instead of keeping a wallet with a Bitcoin exchange, which can track information about customers and send it to authorities, the terrorist group set up wallets fully under its control.

The Qassam site also started providing a new Bitcoin address to each potential donor, a practice that is essentially impossible with traditional financial accounts. The Qassam Brigades appear to have borrowed the method from a media site connected to the Islamic State, which has been generating endless numbers of new Bitcoin addresses to collect money for nearly two years.

The Qassam Brigades did not reply to several requests for comment.

“The terrorists are learning how to send and receive digital currency in a smarter way,” said Itsik Levy, chief executive of Whitestream, the Israeli intelligence firm tracking Bitcoin transactions. “Why would terrorists not take advantage of this? It is great for them.”

Levy said the sums being sent were likely to be small, but were getting harder to track.

The Treasury Department, under Mnuchin, has been promoting international rules that would require cryptocurrency exchanges to do a full identity check on anyone sending digital tokens out of a wallet.

This could make it easier to spot certain illegal transactions. But terrorists and other criminals who use cryptocurrency are already picking up methods that would make it easier to circumvent the new rules, in part by using cryptocurrencies that provide even more privacy than Bitcoin.

Juan Zarate, who was the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism under President George W. Bush, said this was far from the biggest illegal use of cryptocurrencies but one that needed to be watched.

“I think we are still in the experimentation phase for terrorist groups — they are trying to figure out how best to do this,” said Zarate, now an adviser to Coinbase. “What’s a challenge is that you see them continuing to experiment.”

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Hamas shifts tactics in bitcoin fundraising, highlighting crypto risks - research

LONDON/JERUSALEM - The armed wing of Hamas is using increasingly complex methods of raising funds via bitcoin, researchers say, highlighting the difficulties regulators face in tracking cryptocurrency financing of outfits designated by some as terrorist groups.

The Gaza-based Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, which is proscribed by the United States and the European Union, has been calling on its supporters to donate using the digital currency in a fundraising campaign announced online in late January.

Originally, it asked donors to send bitcoin to a single digital address, or wallet.

However, according to research shared with Reuters by leading blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, in recent weeks it has changed the mechanism, with its website generating a new digital wallet with every transaction.

This makes it harder for companies around the world to keep tabs on the group's cryptocurrency financing, the researchers said. A single digital wallet can be red-flagged to cryptocurrency exchanges, in theory allowing them to prevent funds moving through their systems to that destination.

But a different wallet for each donation makes this so-called tagging far more complicated, Elliptic said.

Between March 26 and April 16, 0.6 bitcoin - worth around $3,300 - was sent to the website-created wallets, Elliptic's research found. All told, the four-month fundraising campaign has raised around $7,400, the firm said.

A spokesman for Hamas, which has ruled the Palestinian territory of Gaza since 2007, declined to comment on Elliptic's research.

Such funds are a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars in annual funding that Israel and the United States says Hamas receives from Iran. Yet the campaign gives insight into how a proscribed group has gone about bitcoin fundraising.

"They are still in experimentation stage - trying it out, seeing how much they can raise, and whether it works," said Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson.

Iran has not publicly detailed its funding of Hamas, though it has not denied its support for the group. Hamas has said Tehran is the biggest backer of the al-Qassam Brigades.

London-based Elliptic and U.S. rival Chainalysis are the most prominent blockchain analysis firms, and have gained traction as watchdogs, cryptocurrency companies and firms such as hedge funds seek tools to track digital coins.

Backed by investors including Banco Santander's venture capital arm, Elliptic's clients include financial firms, regulators and law enforcement agencies in Europe and the United States.

Since 2016 it has won contracts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service and Drug Enforcement Administration, according to USAspending.gov, a database of U.S. government contracts.

Examples of cryptocurrency funding campaigns by proscribed groups are rare. But the research underscores headaches for companies in the emerging sector in identifying and stamping out exposure to potentially tainted digital coins, even as tools for tracking and tracing cryptocurrencies grow more sophisticated.

Dealing with illegal usage is seen as vital if cryptocurrencies are to grow from niche, speculative tokens to assets embraced by the mainstream. Most big financial firms have steered clear of bitcoin and its kin, with money laundering chief among concerns.

STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS

Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union. Others, including Britain, have proscribed only the al-Qassam Brigades.

Such a designation means that, in the United States for instance, it is illegal to provide money or training, with financial firms in control of related funds obliged to report them to the authorities.

A two-minute video on the al-Qassam Brigades website lays out step-by-step instructions in Arabic on how supporters can avoid the traditional financial system and donate cryptocurrency.

"How to support the Palestinian resistance via Bitcoin?" it asks.

With polished graphics and English subtitles, it explains how to send bitcoin directly, through a money-exchange office, or via a cryptocurrency exchange. "Use a public device so that the wallet is not linked to your IP address," it says.

Elliptic uses a database of information linking digital coin addresses to exchanges, darkweb marketplaces, and proscribed groups to track cryptocurrencies.

It pinpointed wallets created by the website by tracking patterns in their unique addresses. The firm monitored these addresses, later identifying multiple transactions that sent funds from the addresses to a major Asia-based cryptocurrency exchange.

Thirteen of the donations were made from a separate exchange, also from Asia, said Elliptic, which declined to give further details of the exchanges. It was not clear whether the bitcoin had since been converted to traditional currencies, the firm said.

PATCHY REGULATION

Hamas's finances are suffering. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi in 2013 closed hundreds of tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border, preventing the smuggling of weapons and goods from cows to cars, depriving Hamas of tax income.

Funding from Iran has also declined following Hamas's condemnation of the killing of Sunni Muslims in Syria's civil war, analysts say.

Bitcoin could provide respite in that cash squeeze.

"It makes it difficult for such funds to be tracked by financial authorities," said Lotem Finkelshtein, head of threat intelligence at Check Point Technologies, a cybersecurity firm in Tel Aviv.

"It's not so simple to link wallets to organisations."

Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency, defense ministry and military declined to comment.

Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, who is also a member of the national security cabinet, told the website Ynet TV this month he was unaware of the fundraising.

Regulators and law enforcement agencies have long worried about the potential of digital money - relatively anonymous and easily available online - to finance terrorism.

Cryptocurrency regulations vary from country to country. The global watchdog for money laundering, aware of gaps in rules, is due to bring in the first international standards on cryptocurrency oversight by June.

But with regulation still patchy, the risk of exposure to tainted coins has kept most big investors away.

Even indirect exposure to tainted cryptocurrencies would present problems for financial firms, said Kyle Phillips, a lawyer at Fieldfisher law firm.

"There are real issues with establishing the beneficial owners," he said.

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Palestinian president to shun Pence over Jerusalem move

Ramallah, Palestinian Territories - Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas will refuse to meet US Vice President Mike Pence later this month following Washington's controversial policy shift on Jerusalem, an Abbas aide said on Saturday, as protests gripped the Palestinian territories for a third straight day.

   
Retaliatory Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip killed two Hamas militants before dawn, as unrest simmered over President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital on Wednesday.

Four people have been killed and dozens wounded since Trump announced the move, which drew criticism from every other member of the UN Security Council at an emergency meeting on Friday.

"There will be no meeting with the vice president of America in Palestine," Abbas's diplomatic adviser Majdi al-Khaldi told AFP.

"The United States has crossed all the red lines with the Jerusalem decision," he added.

Egypt's Coptic Pope Tawadros II also cancelled a meeting with Pence, with the church saying it "declines to receive" him in protest at Trump's announcement which failed to take into account the "feelings of millions" of Arabs.

That decision came a day after Ahmed al-Tayeb who heads Al-Azhar, Egypt's top Sunni Muslim institution, also scrapped plans to meet the US vice president over the "unjust and unfair American decision on Jerusalem".

There were fresh clashes on Saturday as Palestinian protesters in the occupied West Bank hurled stones at Israeli troops, who responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and live rounds.

In the Gaza Strip, mourners vented their anger at the funerals of two people killed by Israeli troops during clashes at the border fence on Friday and the two Hamas militants killed early on Saturday.

'VIOLENT RIOTS'

An Israeli army statement said "violent riots have erupted at approximately 20 locations" in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip" with protesters throwing rocks, petrol bombs and rolling burning tyres at troops.

It said soldiers responded with unspecified "riot dispersal means", lightly wounding three Palestinians.

In Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, police fired stun grenades to disperse Palestinian demonstrators on the main Salahedin street, an AFP cameraman said.

A police statement said two policemen were slightly injured and six protesters arrested.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said 12 Palestinians were injured by shrapnel from grenades or by blows from police.

INTIFADA CALLS

There have been fears of a much larger escalation of violence after Hamas leader Ismail Haniya called for a new Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group both renewed that call on Saturday.

Dozens of protesters were wounded by rubber bullets or live fire in clashes in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem that followed the main weekly Muslim prayers on Friday.

Tens of thousands also protested in Muslim and Arab countries, including Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia.

Saturday's pre-dawn air strike on a base of Hamas's military wing in Nusseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, was one of several, the Israeli military said.

A statement said the air force "targeted four facilities belonging to the Hamas terror organisation" in Gaza a day after three rocket attacks from the Palestinian enclave into southern Israel.

One rocket hit the southern Israeli town of Sderot although Israeli public radio said it did not explode and did not cause any casualties.

Israel had already responded on Friday night to the first two rockets with air strikes in which the Gaza health ministry said 14 people were wounded, among them women and children.

In an Arabic-language Facebook post on Saturday, a senior Israeli military officer delivered a stern warning to the people of Gaza.

"Continued fire will result in a harsh and painful response from the Israel Defence Forces, so do not test our strength," wrote Major General Yoav Mordechai, head of the defence ministry agency responsible for civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories.

The Hamas health ministry in Gaza said the two men killed in Saturday's strikes were members of the movement's armed wing, which has fought three wars with Israel since 2008.

US ISOLATED

Trump's decision drew lavish praise from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but has sparked a worldwide diplomatic backlash. 

Five European countries on the Security Council insisted the new US policy was inconsistent with past resolutions, including one that declares east Jerusalem to be Israeli-occupied.

The meeting was requested by eight of the council's 15 members but was largely symbolic as no vote on a resolution was planned because the US wields veto power.

Trump said his defiant move -- making good on a 2016 presidential campaign pledge -- marked the start of a "new approach" to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The decision is likely to impact domestic Palestinian politics, particularly between Abbas's Fatah and the Islamist Hamas, after a decade of bitter enmity now at a key stage in a fragile reconciliation process.

Abbas "will soon take a harder line toward the peace process and a softer line toward Hamas than he otherwise would have," wrote Ghaith al-Omari of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy.

Hamas, which violently seized Gaza from Fatah in 2017, is due to formally hand back power on Sunday.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said in a statement on Saturday that the group "reiterated its commitment to all that has been signed and agreed upon and the completion of the handover".

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Fresh bloodshed in Gaza as Hamas denies holding soldier

GAZA CITY - A fresh wave of violence killed dozens in Gaza after the collapse of a UN and US backed ceasefire, officials said Saturday, as Hamas denied it kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

A Palestinian delegation was due to arrive in Cairo for talks on the terms of a durable truce, however, even after the 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire fell apart within hours starting on Friday.

But the chances of a new truce seemed remote after Israel said it believed militants captured Second Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, 23, in an attack near the southern Gaza city of Rafah that killed two other soldiers.

In the violence that ensued, at least 107 Palestinians were killed in Israel air strikes on the Gaza Strip, including 35 since midnight, officials said.

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, a member of Israel's security cabinet which met till the early hours of Saturday, accused Hamas of being behind the soldier's disappearance and said the group would pay a high price.

US President Barack Obama called for the soldier to be "unconditionally" released, but also said more must be done to protect Gaza civilians.

But Hamas' armed wing denied any knowledge about the fate of the missing soldier.

"The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades has no information on this soldier. We have lost contact with one of our combatant groups, which was fighting in the sector where the soldier went missing and it is possible that our fighters and this soldier were killed," it said.

On Saturday, AFP correspondents said Israeli aerial strikes targeted a mosque at Jebaliya, in northern Gaza, and flattened houses in a beachside neighbourhood.

In Israel, the Iron Dome air defence system intercepted two rockets fired from Gaza over the Tel Aviv area and another over the southern city of Beersheba, the army said.

The Qassam Brigades said they had fired three rockets at Tel Aviv.

- Congress approves Israel funds -

The US Congress had meanwhile on Friday approved an emergency $225 million to restock the Iron Dome systems with interceptor missiles, in a measure that awaits Obama's signature.

Palestinian emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said at least 107 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since the planned three-day ceasefire collapsed soon after it started at 0500 GMT on Friday.

Since the conflict broke out on July 8, a total of about 1,650 Palestinians have been killed in the violence, the vast majority of them civilians, Qudra said. On the Israeli side, 63 soldiers and three civilians have died.

The Israeli military said the two latest deaths among its forces occurred in the same incident in which the soldier went missing near Rafah.

"Our initial indications suggest a soldier has been abducted by terrorists in an incident where terrorists breached the ceasefire," said spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner.

Israelis are highly sensitive about the kidnapping of their soldiers.

In 2006, Hamas militants from Gaza captured Israeli conscript Gilad Shalit and held him for five years before freeing him in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

Obama said the United States "unequivocally condemned Hamas and the Palestinian factions that were responsible for killing two Israeli soldiers, and abducting a third almost minutes after a ceasefire had been announced".

"If they are serious about trying to trying to resolve this situation, that soldier needs to be unconditionally released, as soon as possible.

"We have also been clear that innocent civilians in Gaza caught in the crossfire have to weigh on our conscience and we have to do more to protect them," the US president added.

- Cairo talks 'still on' -

US Secretary of State John Kerry had said that once the ceasefire was under way, Israeli and Palestinian representatives, including from Hamas, would begin talks in Cairo on a more durable truce.

The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad later said Egypt was postponing the talks after news of the missing Israeli soldier, but Cairo said the invitation to talk was "still in place".

And Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said a joint delegation, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, would travel to Cairo on Saturday for talks despite the renewed fighting.

Before the truce, Israeli tank fire and aerial bombardment killed 14 Palestinians in Gaza, and the army said five soldiers died in mortar fire near the shared border.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office accused Hamas and other Gaza militants of "flagrantly violating" the ceasefire.

Hamas in turn said Israel "violated the ceasefire" and that "the Palestinian resistance acted based on... the right to self defence".

Israel launched "Operation Protective Edge" on July 8 to counter rocket fire from Gaza, and nine days later it sent ground troops into the Palestinian enclave to destroy tunnels used by militants to attack its territory.

It has vowed to press on with the offensive until the tunnels are demolished.

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