A top Treasury Department official is heading to Saudi Arabia and Qatar next week to intensify US efforts to cut off financial lifelines to Hamas and discuss humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip.
Brian Nelson, under secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, will help lead a session in Saudi Arabia of the Executive Committee of the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center, the Treasury Department said in a statement Friday.
The committee has been charged forging ties among six Arab countries and the US to disrupt terrorist financing networks through sanctions and law enforcement actions. That’s become a more pressing priority in the days since Hamas killed 1,400 people and took some 200 hostages in an October 7 attack on Israel.
Nelson’s trip, which will include meetings with top Saudi and Qatari officials, unfolds as the Biden administration looks to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spreading.
Qatar hosts some Hamas political leaders and the US has encouraged the small Persian Gulf country to act as a liaison with the group, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union.
“Qatar has access to Hamas that we certainly don’t have and the Israelis don’t have,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power.”
