A US Court is Indicting a Palestinian Billionaire for Collaborating with Hamas.

Basher Masri who was born in Nablus, otherwise known by its Hebrew name Shechem, out of a family that migrated into the area from Egypt (al-Masri is Arabic for “the Egyptian”) gives the impression of being a successful and sophisticated Westerner.

His reputation as a Palestinian symbol was varnished, or tarnished, by having been twice arrested as a teenager for hurling rocks at Israeli soldiers. As a member of the leading wealthy Nablus family, his father first sent him to Egypt to complete his high school, and he went from there to study chemical engineering at Virgina Tech. He later worked for a consulting firm in Washington DC where he met his future wife, Jane.

Masri returned to the Palestinian territories in 2005 with his wife and two daughters and developed his holding company, Massar International which, with Qatari investment, built the luxury Rawabi suburb of Ramallah to house and entertain the increasingly corrupt Palestinian Authority leadership and their associates through his Palestine Development & Investment and his Palestinian Industrial Estate Development companies.

Basher Masri is also trying to prize his way into Jerusalem. In partnership with the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, he is attempting to build a 400 units housing project to be built in Jerusalem after more than 10 years unsuccessful attempts to get a building permit from the Jerusalem Municipality.

Masri said in 2021 that, “this project is intended for the upper-income people in order to keep them in their country.”

He wasn’t referring to Israeli Jews or Arabs. Masri looks on Jerusalem, not Ramallah, as a Palestinian capital.

It is worth remembering that, in 1948, when the Jordanian army invaded the nascent state of Israel they occupied the territory up to an including East Jerusalem and a Jewish majority Old City, they drove the Jews out of their properties and allowed them to be occupied by Arabs who are still living in homes and businesses in which Jews still have title seventy-seven years later and have not been compensated.

Now Basher Masri wants to build hundreds of homes not for Israeli Arabs but for Palestinian ownership inside Israel’s capital. The cost of the construction, he said, would be handled solely by his company, Massar International, registered in Ramallah.

Masri made a bid to buy Digal, a troubled Israeli company that planned to build this 400-unit housing project, in a project known as Nof Zion. (Zion View).

That name would not be used should Masri succeed in obtaining this approved contract. It will probably be renamed Nof Palestine.

This project is still stuck both in both Bank Leumi and in the courts.

However, elsewhere Basher al-Masri has been busy.

According to a case brought before the US District Court of Columbia by hundreds of victims of the 7 October 2023 Palestinian invasion of Israel with its resultant massacres, rapes, tortures, damage, theft, and hostage taking, Basher al-Masri and his companies are facing serious charges of materially aiding and abetting Hamas and others is their preparation and execution of the 7/10 atrocities.

It is claimed in the court brief that Masri and his companies “were an integral part of the grand deception” as Hamas planned the construction of Gaza in preparation for their assault against Israel.

It is also claimed that Masri, a naturalized US citizen “grew up believing that violence against Jews and Israel was justified and he came to play a role in the First Intifada, the coordinated campaign of violence launched by various Palestinian factions, including Hamas, against Israel that began in 1987 and continued until 1993 when the Oslo Accords were signed.”

The deposition goes on to claim that Masri “was attracting praise and securing capital from governmental and multilateral institutions in the US to invest in large-scale development projects in Palestinian territories, he and the companies he controls were actively conspiring with Hamas both to build infrastructure used on October 7, 2023, and to provide cover to Hamas’s true violent aims.”

Masri and his companies were named in the court deposition that is accusing him of constructing and concealing Hamas’s attack tunnels, their storage and launch positions of their rockets, facilities to host Hamas leadership, their foot soldiers, to train Hamas naval commandos, and even to produce electricity for the Hamas attack tunnel infrastructure.

Masri is accused of installing an unnamed individual closely tied to Hamas as his Chairman of PIEDCO – the Palestinian Industrial Estate Development Company.

Masri is accused of using his Massar International Ltd holding company to secure funding from the United States and various other governmental and international organizations for funding that flowed into Gaza and which Masri used in part to provide logistical and infrastructural support to Hamas.

The Gazan properties that Masri developed with Hamas were not only part of the infrastructure used in connection to the 7/10 attack but that it deliberately advanced Hamas’s false narrative that it was primarily interested in the economic development of Gaza and a grudging coexistence with Israel.

While many in the United States and elsewhere were understandably skeptical about financing the development of an enclave controlled by a violent, US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, Masri traded on his cultivated image as a peace-building businessman by using his image and his connections both in the Palestinian territories including Ramallah and in Washington DC, and across the West, to convince US institutions, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the European Union to invest in his Gaza projects.

The Court brief states that Masri cloaked himself in legitimacy in service of this grand deception.

Masri leveraged his meticulously cultivated image in DC to gain consulting contracts and to secure financing for his Gaza development projects.

At the same time as he was securing US taxpayer dollars and financial support for major development projects funded by Qatar.

All these fundraising efforts had the effect of deterring Israel from striking his Gaza development sites, the crown jewel being his Gaza Industrial Estate (GIE) which he personally visited and oversaw the operation on his 480,000 square meter industrial park which sat just a few hundred yards from the border fence with Israel and Kibbutz Nahal Oz, an Israeli community that was destroyed during the October 7 attack.

The Court claims that Masri and others worked openly and knowingly with senior Hamas leaders including, significantly, in the months before the October 7 attack, with the Hamas official in charge of the development of Hamas’s military-industrial base in Gaza.

Above ground, the GIE was a showcase for legitimate business but, below the surface, Masri and the companies he controlled worked with Hamas to construct and conceal an elaborate subterranean attack tunnel network which Hamas used to burrow under the border into Israel, to attack nearby Israeli communities, and to ambush Israeli military personnel.

Hamas used the GIE to probe the border fence and test the ID’s response times and counter-measures in the lead up to the 7/10 attack. Hamas even installed an anti-tank battery in one of the GIE’s water towers facing the border.

Thanks to the finances that Masri obtained from the IFU in Washington DC, the GIE featured advanced solar technology intended in part to provide electrical power down to the Hamas attack tunnels even when other parts of Gaza were without electricity due to power shortage,

The use of two of Masri’s luxury seaside hotels are listed in the Court deposition in which top Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, regularly used to hold public and private Hamas events. Back in 2014, the Al Mashtal Hotel, adorned by UN and EU logos, had a significant network of Hamas terror attack tunnels used to store and launch missiles into Israel as well as serving as command centers for Hamas’s leaders during the conflicts with Israel.

Even after Israel damaged and caused damage to this terror hosting hotel, Masri and his companies worked closely with Hamas to renovate and refurbish the hotel to their needs.

By October 2023 and thereafter Hamas’s terror tunnel network not only ran under Masri’s hotels, but the tunnels were accessible directly from guest rooms and other hotel facilities.

The restored Blue Beach Hotel also included a labyrinth of tunnels with multiple shafts accessible inside and on the grounds of the hotel.

This Blue Beach Hotel linked directly to the Badr Base Hamas training facility a few hundred meters southwest of the hotel where the Izz al-Din-al-Qassam Brigades trained its equivalent of Hamas’s Navy Seals enabling them to reach the Mediterranean without deploying above ground.

During and after the October 7 attack, Hamas used Masri’s hotels and tunnel network that connected them both as a base of operation and a defensive position from which to ambush Israeli soldiers.

The hotels were severely damaged in November 2023 after a pitched battle between the IDF and Hamas terrorists positioned inside and under the hotels.

By actively working with Hamas to build and maintain its attack tunnel infrastructure while simultaneously advancing Hamas’s campaign of deception, Basher Masri is charged with aiding and abetting and conspiring with Hamas and the October 7 attack, and the deaths of civilians and soldiers were a foreseeable consequence of Basher Masri’s collaboration with Hamas.

The US District Court of Columbia’s indictment of Basher Marsi’s enthusiastic personal and business involvement with the fanatical Hamas anti-Israel mass murder of Jews is shocking.

It is well-nigh impossible for Masri to claim he was ignorant of the terror purposes that his hands-on investments paid for given his frequent visits and his close personal friendships with the Hamas leadership.

This case will be a major embarrassment for the Trump Administration through Basher Masri’s close connection with Trump’s envoy for hostage affairs, Adam Biehler, who Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit, reported as having used Masri’s private jet for months to facilitate negotiations with his Hamas friends.

Two further negative strikes against Basher Masri.

In April 2025, Palestinian-American billionaire Bashar Masri resigned from his position on the Dean’s Council at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government after being accused by families of Oct. 7 attack victims of aiding Hamas. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, claims he helped build terror tunnels and rocket launch sites in Gaza.

Then, adding more mystery to Masri’s potential guilt, in August 2025 the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the US case said they were unable to find him, according to The Times of Israel.

The publicity and money seeking Palestinian has disappeared.

It is increasingly apparent that he is on the run, evading justice for his intimate relationship with Hamas, the Palestinian Jew-hating terror organization.

https://ko-fi.com/barryshaw

Barry Shaw, Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.