PayPal shut down a Gaza fundraising account after a pro-Israel think tank warned it could have been unlawfully "aiding and abetting terrorism."
Credit card processor Stripe launched an internal investigation into the matter.
PayPal shut down the account for the Spanish Bizilur Association for Cooperation and Development for People, which had partnered with the Union of Agriculture Work Committees, an organization Israel declared as a terrorist group in 2021, for a Gaza relief campaign, reported The Washington Examiner.
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees has been long tied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a United States-designated terrorist group.
"We applaud PayPal for taking quick action on this important matter and urge Stripe to follow suit," said Zachor Legal Institute President Marc Greendorfer.
He had told the two financial companies that he would be in contact with the Treasury Department and the IRS.
"As we have advocated for quite some time, the problem of faux humanitarian groups being used by designated terror groups for fundraising and other support is an epidemic," Greendorfer said.
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees, based in the West Bank, was identified as the "agricultural" arm of the PFLP in 1993.
Meanwhile, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express barred the Union of Agricultural Work Committees from using their services over its ties to the PFLP, according to Israeli watchdog NGO Monitor.
A year later, Union of Agricultural Work Committees staffers Samer Arbid and Abdul Razeq Farraj were charged with being involved with a PFLP cell in the West Bank and in a roadside bombing that killed an Israeli teenager.
Bizilur claims on its website that it is against "neoliberal, imperialist, and hetero-patriarchal" systems.
It also said that money donated to the Gaza fundraiser would be "sent directly to Palestine, where UAWC is made up of a network of more than 50 local peasant committees in both Gaza and the West Bank."
Greendorfer, in his letter to PayPal, said payments to Bizilur's account would "likely fund terror groups operating in Gaza." He also cited several U.S. anti-terrorist funding laws, leading to PayPal removing the Bizilur account and not allowing any donations to it to be processed through its service.
PayPal declined a request for comment, but its policies prohibit services from being used for "the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime."
A review from the Examiner, however, showed that Stripe still appears to be processing payments for the Gaza fundraiser, and Bizilur appears to be using a bank account through the Spanish company Laboral Kutxa to accept wire transfers.
Stripe's policies say that the platform cannot be used to promote "any other products or services that violate laws in the jurisdictions where your business is located or targeted to."
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who called on federal agencies in September to investigate a Democrat-connected software platform Act Blue for allowing an anti-Israel group to raise funds, told the Examiner: "The more we learn about the scope of terror funding, its enablers around the world, and the abuse of our payment processing systems here at home, the more we realize the need for action is already overdue."
A source close to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on which Issa sits, said GOP congressional investigators must "get creative" while finding ways to block payment processors from boosting terrorist factions.
"It's more systemic than first realized, and it's going to take a comprehensive response, to which this Congress has to be involved," the source said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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