Fighting Terrorism

Tracking and blocking terror financing

Even the most secretive terror organizations share one central weakness: money.

Without an economic infrastructure, a terror organization cannot recruit operatives, buy weapons and communications equipment, train its people, or build the civilian infrastructure that supports its activity. A steady flow of funding is essential to the orderly, systematic operation of terror networks. By taking legal action, Shurat HaDin has succeeded in stopping money that once flowed freely to terror organizations.

Lawyers on the front line

From the 1990s, Western countries passed laws that allow victims of terror to sue the regimes and bodies that give material or financial support to terror groups. These include banks that provide financial services to terror organizations, and charities that raise money for terror under a humanitarian cover.

Lawyers became central players in the campaign to stop the flow of money to terror, and victims and their families gained the chance to fight back in the legal arena. Shurat HaDin specializes in tracing the assets and bank accounts of terror organizations, then seizing and attaching them through the courts, which restrains and disrupts their operations.

“It is an endless battle, but the only way to weaken terror groups is to harm their funding… If we cut off their money supply, we can bring about their downfall.”

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder and president, Shurat HaDin

Terrorists are a product of terror financing

At its core, a terror organization is a business. Day after day, terror groups raise, invest, allocate and transfer money for their purposes. According to documents seized and exposed during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the financial support devoted to terror was ongoing and large-scale.

Terror operatives are shaped from a young age. Incitement begins in elementary school and continues through youth movements, summer camps, clinics and community centers, presenting attacks as heroism and their perpetrators as heroes. The payments to terrorists’ families, sizable sums paid over many years, turn the choice of terror into an economically worthwhile one.

An explosive vest or a car bomb costs little on its own. Training suicide bombers and terror operatives, however, is a long and very expensive process. That is why stopping the money that funds terror is such a significant course of action.