Is Gaza Now, the Telegram outlet the Treasury Department sanctioned for raising money for Hamas, still operating?
Yes. On the morning of October 21, 2026, Gaza Now’s main Arabic channel had 1,120,559 subscribers, nearly twice the 622,200 shown in a screenshot taken on the night of October 7, 2023. It last posted at 7:23 a.m. EDT that day. It still carries Telegram’s blue verification check, and it is still asking for money. In the past week it pinned an appeal listing five Egyptian payment numbers and told followers to send Telegram Stars, a currency Telegram lets channel owners convert into cryptocurrency.
Treasury designated Gaza Now on March 27, 2024. Tether froze a donation address on its list the same day. Neither step took the channel off Telegram.
That frozen address leads to San Diego. Gaza Now pinned it on October 7, 2023, as the Tether address of Ikram – The Arab Charity Foundation. Ikram’s chief executive, Reda Mazen Rida Sabassi, is now charged in federal court in Manhattan with conspiring to provide material support to Hamas. The charges are allegations. On the public ledger, the address took in 17 donations in three days and was emptied into a Binance wallet on October 9, 2023, five and a half months before the freeze.
Editor’s note: Hamas has been a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization since October 8, 1997. Federal law punishes anyone who “knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.”
Still on Telegram
Treasury sanctioned Gaza Now, a Gaza-based online outlet, and named Mustafa Ayash as its founder and director. “In the wake of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas against Israel, Gaza Now engaged in fundraising efforts to support Hamas,” the department said. The sanctions entry, still on the Office of Foreign Assets Control list as of October 21, 2026, gives the outlet’s aliases as GNNANOW, GAZAALAN and GAZAALANNET. The last is the handle of its main Telegram channel.
That channel posted 184 times in the week from 5:10 p.m. EDT on October 14 to 7:23 a.m. on October 21. Its profile directs readers to three sister channels: one in English, with 172,000 subscribers; one in Russian, with 7,720; and a second Arabic channel, with 137,000, which the profile describes as being for countries where the official channel does not appear. All four posted on the morning of October 21. Every one lists the same contact account for its team, @Gazasupport.
The channel has also kept raising money. On October 16 and again on October 18, it posted an Arabic appeal to supporters in Egypt to pay for drinking water, with one InstaPay number and four Vodafone Cash numbers, Egypt’s bank-transfer and mobile-wallet services. Donors outside Egypt were told to send money to a trusted person in Egypt to forward, because those were the only two methods then available. Donors were told to send a photo of each transfer to @Gazasupport. The October 16 version had 15,200 views by the morning of October 21.
The English channel pushes a second rail. A post on October 14 called Telegram Stars the easiest way to donate and walked readers through it: open the channel, tap its name, tap the Send Stars button and pay with a bank card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, an app-store balance or PayPal. A pinned post said $10 could help provide drinking water to displaced families. Stars are Telegram’s in-app currency. Of Stars sent to a channel, Telegram’s developer documentation says, “Channel owners receive 100% of the stars — and can convert them into Gram cryptocurrency rewards or subsidized ads.” Telegram’s terms say it “currently outsources the processing of all Content Creator Rewards to Fragment,” a separate platform.
The federal complaint against Sabassi, filed in June 2026, says the same thing in its own words: “Gaza Now has used, and is currently using, various social media accounts to solicit funds.”
The San Diego End
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a five-count complaint against Sabassi, 38, on June 17, 2026, the day after his arrest in San Diego. “From within the United States, Reda Sabassi is alleged to have solicited and diverted funds to the known foreign terrorist organization, Hamas, which committed the brutal October 7, 2023, massacre,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said. The counts are conspiracy to provide material support to Hamas, conspiracy to violate sanctions law, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and making false statements. The case carries the docket number 1:26-cr-00290 in the Southern District of New York.
The complaint, sworn by an FBI agent on June 15, 2026, identifies Sabassi as Ikram’s chief executive, chief financial officer and secretary, and says Ikram has been a registered 501(c)(3) charity in San Diego since at least October 2022. It recounts what he told agents in a voluntary interview in March 2024. “After October 7, 2023, SABASSI downloaded the al-Qassam Brigades application on his phone, which he said was a news application,” the complaint says. The al-Qassam Brigades are Hamas’s armed wing. “SABASSI stated that he believed that Hamas has a noble cause, which is to get their land back,” it continues. “SABASSI claimed that he would not support Hamas with weapons or money because it is illegal.”
The complaint traces Sabassi’s contact with the man it describes as Gaza Now’s manager and operator, whom it does not name, to at least October 2017, by phone and messaging apps. It says that in November 2023 Sabassi asked him where to find Hamas’s video archive of the October 7 attack and was pointed to the al-Qassam Brigades’ Telegram channel.
One Donation Rail
By the complaint’s account, the money ran both ways for years. “Ikram has previously posted fundraisers to social media accounts with and on behalf of Gaza Now, and Gaza Now has done the same for Ikram,” the FBI agent wrote. In June 2022, the complaint says, a Gaza Now account asked for money for a family in Gaza to be sent to Sabassi’s account on a remittance platform. From March 2023 to on or about October 9, 2023, Ikram ran a crowdfunding page that “explicitly stated that the campaign was for Ikram and Gaza Now,” which Gaza Now advertised on Telegram. The complaint also says Sabassi logged into a remittance account Gaza Now’s operator used to collect money.
On the night of the attack, the rail went live on Gaza Now’s channel. A pinned message, with 271,300 views in a screenshot taken that night, gave three ways to pay: Ikram’s PayPal address, ikram.acf@gmail.com; a Tether address on the TRON network, TGJVc32ig2u8tQsYM
The screenshot survives because a LinkedIn account in the name of Nourhan Mahmoud posted it at 21:02 UTC on October 7, 2023, with the same three payment details typed out in Arabic above it. The post opens, “لتقديم التبرع والدعم من خلال ايميل PAYPAL الباي بال,” an invitation to donate through the PayPal email address that follows. It is still public.
The account’s public profile describes a software engineer and back-end developer in Egypt. It lists PHP and Laravel jobs, including one in Cairo’s Nasr City from June 2024 to November 2025, and courses at Egypt’s Information Technology Institute and National Telecommunication Institute. Neither the profile nor the post says anything about Ikram or Gaza Now, and no public record reviewed for this report ties her to either beyond the post.
The timing points to Telegram as the trigger. The phone clock in the screenshot reads 12:01. The LinkedIn post went up at 21:02 UTC, 12:02 a.m. in Gaza, so the phone appears to have been on Gaza time. On that clock, Gaza Now’s message went up at 10:38 p.m., or 19:38 UTC. The first donation reached the Tether address nine minutes later, 75 minutes before the LinkedIn post. The Ko-fi link no longer works; ko-fi.com/ikramacf now sends visitors to Ko-fi’s home page.
Where the Tether Went
The Ikram address had been quiet since September 6, 2023, holding $55. Then the donations came, from 13 sending addresses. The analyst pulled every Tether transfer on the address from TronGrid, TRON’s public data service, and checked the totals against the Tronscan record for the address.
| Date | Donations | Amount (USDT) |
|---|---|---|
| October 7 | 3 | 362.88 |
| October 8 | 8 | 784.82 |
| October 9 | 6 | 1,401.75 |
| Total | 17 | 2,549.45 |
On October 9, the balance went out in two transfers to the same wallet, TV6MuMXfmLbBqPZv
Three public records mark the receiving wallet as Binance’s and the Ikram address as a Binance customer’s deposit address, a slot an exchange assigns to one account. The receiving wallet appears in a GraphSense tag file of Binance reserve wallets, and it received all 73 of the Ikram address’s outgoing payments from October 2021 to October 2023, about $770,334.50. Ten minutes before each sweep, a Binance-tagged address, TB3UZsVL7Sdrrug
Binance began requiring identity checks for every account in August 2021. That verification, The Block reported at the time, “includes the submissions of government-issued ID as well as facial verification.” If the records are right, the October 2023 donations were credited to a verified Binance customer whose identity documents sit in Binance’s files, within reach of a subpoena.
Before October 7, the address did not look like a donation box. From August 2021 to September 2023 it took in $767,785.04 in 161 transfers, most of it in 2022. Of that, $754,621.02 came in 131 withdrawals from a Gate.io wallet. The pattern fits one person moving money between two exchanges. The ledger does not say why.
“Frozen Within Hours”
The complaint quotes messages that show how closely Sabassi and Gaza Now’s operator watched the rails. On October 18, 2023, the operator wrote that “we were shocked that our account is frozen.” Sabassi replied that “[i]f the Zionists learned about it [cryptocurrency addresses] from Telegram they will submit a request to Tether and it will be frozen within hours.” Ten days later, the complaint says, the operator asked him for new wallet addresses and told him to “[t]ransfer the money to another wallet that you create yourself, and from the unannounced wallet we transfer to them.”
The fundraising moved to new pages. Prosecutors allege that from December 2023 to February 2024, Sabassi raised about $604,000 through four online fundraisers, at least two of which Gaza Now promoted, and sent about $116,000 to a man in Turkey the complaint describes as a Hamas member. They say he tried to convert about $382,000 to Tether for a TRON address, beginning “TAbZ,” that Gaza Now’s operator sent him in January 2024. That address is not the one Gaza Now pinned in October 2023.
When Treasury designated Gaza Now on March 27, 2024, it published five Tether addresses for the outlet. The Ikram address is the second: “alt. Digital Currency Address - USDT TGJVc32ig2u8tQsYMLE7KXHT5NDQroaVNU.” The same action sanctioned Aozma Sultana, director of the British companies Al-Qureshi Executives and Aakhirah Limited. “Sultana and these two companies have given thousands of dollars to Gaza Now and advertised Gaza Now as a partner during a joint fundraiser shortly after the October 7 terrorist attack,” Treasury said.
Tether blacklisted the address that day. The freeze appears on the TRON ledger as an “AddedBlackList” event at 17:05 UTC on March 27, 2024. It locked nothing. The address had been empty since the October 9 sweeps. Sabassi’s “within hours” estimate was off by five and a half months, and the money had reached Binance in two days.
Two and a half years later, none of the 373 posts on Gaza Now’s main and English channels from October 14 to 21, 2026, carried a cryptocurrency address. The appeals ran on Egyptian payment numbers and Telegram’s own currency.
What the Record Does Not Show
The public record does not say whose Binance account received the Ikram donations. The tags that mark it as a Binance user come from explorers, not from Binance, and Binance has not commented on the address.
Several October 2023 donors paid from the shared wallets that large exchanges use to send out customer withdrawals, among them a Bybit wallet that sent three payments. Large numbers of unrelated customers withdraw through wallets like these. A shared exchange wallet behind several donations proves nothing about who sent them, and this report draws no link from it.
Telegram does not publish a channel’s Stars balance, and nothing public shows whether Gaza Now has converted any. The records reviewed for this report do not show who holds the Egyptian wallet numbers. Two Ethereum addresses the OctoProbe investigation tied to Gaza Now are effectively empty: one has no mainnet activity, and the other shows five transactions from July to October 2024, none above 0.017 ether.
How This Story Was Reported
An OctoProbe investigation began with the charged defendant, the charity, Gaza Now and the people Treasury named. Twenty-nine rounds of expansion produced 420 nodes and 688 links, including the Ikram address, Gaza Now’s domains and the LinkedIn post. The analyst traced every Tether transfer on the Ikram address through TronGrid’s public API, checked wallet labels against GraphSense, OKLink and ichatgo, and confirmed the Tether freeze from the token contract’s event log. Gaza Now’s Telegram channels were read through Telegram’s public web previews on October 21, 2026; this report identifies them by handle and post number but does not link them. Screenshots were captured the same day.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Gaza Now still on Telegram?
Yes. As of October 21, 2026, its main Arabic channel had about 1.12 million subscribers and was posting daily, alongside English, Russian and backup Arabic channels. Treasury sanctioned the outlet on March 27, 2024.
How does Gaza Now ask for money now?
In October 2026 posts, it listed Egyptian InstaPay and Vodafone Cash numbers and urged followers to send Telegram Stars. Telegram says channel owners can convert Stars into cryptocurrency rewards.
Who is Reda Mazen Rida Sabassi?
He is a 38-year-old San Diego resident and the chief executive of Ikram – The Arab Charity Foundation. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged him in June 2026 with conspiring to provide material support to Hamas, sanctions, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies, and false statements. The charges are allegations.
What happened to the Ikram Tether address Gaza Now posted?
It took in 17 donations, about $2,549, from October 7 to 9, 2023, and was swept to a Binance wallet on October 9. Treasury listed it under Gaza Now and Tether froze it on March 27, 2024, after it had been emptied.
