Terror Finance Weekly

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Welcome back,

This morning The Jerusalem Post published a feature on the Hezbollah Financial Statements, a CENTEF research series that models Hezbollah the way a financial analyst models a company, and the first two reports are now available on our website. This issue opens with a closer look at the series, just below.

Next week we will be in Herzliya for the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism’s (ICT) World Summit, where the series will be part of our Terror Financing workshop on 8 October. If you are attending, please say hello. If not, the full session will be available on our website later that day.

As always, we would love to hear what you think. Reply to this email and it will reach us.

Sharon Gal

Chief Executive Officer, CENTEF

When we founded CENTEF, our goal was to analyze terror organizations through a financial lens, using a technological drive, the way you would any other business. Naturally, these groups aren’t keen to share their finances. They understand that revealing their financial reports would expose their pain points, which the Counter-Terror Financing community would quickly turn into choke points.

While kinetic operations destroy stock, financial operations destroy the ability to replace it or, even better, the ability to procure it in the first place. As another example, consider two kinetic operations that can eliminate the same amount of terrorists and infrastructure, yet one costs Hezbollah $100 million to recover from while the other costs $800 million. A defense minister would definitely want this data presented before making a decision.

Because Hezbollah’s financial reports were nowhere to be found, we set out to research and build them ourselves.

There are many estimates of Hezbollah’s overall annual budget. Most rely on guesswork, some on fragmented data, and all of them look exclusively at the revenue side. But the beauty of financial reports is that they are a closed system that must ultimately balance. So we asked a simple question: why not analyze Hezbollah from the expense side? And that is exactly what we set out to do. We assembled a team of experts from diverse fields, armed them with the best technology we developed and acquired, and dove deep into the challenge.

We invite you to follow our publications as the project progresses, and make your own assumptions about Hezbollah’s finances. Our interactive tool, which can be found here, allows you to create a budget for Hezbollah based on budget categories that we’re studying. You can even break down the budget between cash expenditures that Hezbollah itself is on the hook for, and Iranian in-kind transfers, which are non-cash items Iran supplies to Hezbollah directly, such as weapons.

The first report we are publishing today covers weapons and munitions procurement for fiscal year 2024, from Katyusha rockets and Kornet launchers and missiles, to drones, launch platforms, and pickup trucks.

Other topics our researchers have explored, and will examine across the series, include Hezbollah’s media expenditures, payments to wounded fighters, and spending on its military infrastructure.

Each report in the series will reach subscribers to this newsletter first.

Join us as we embark on this project.

 

The Sanctions Paradox: Squeezing Iran, Opening Syria, and the Houthi Blind Spot

CENTEF ANALYSIS  ·  21 to 27 September 2026

If you want to understand the current pivot in U.S. economic statecraft, look at how the Treasury Department handled three very different Middle East flashpoints this past week.

We are watching Washington aggressively choke one adversary, Iran, legally rehabilitate a former pariah, Syria, and curiously ignore a massive escalation by a third, the Houthis in Yemen. Here is how the pieces fit together.

1. Choking Point: Grounding Iran’s Airlines

The U.S. is weaponizing the dollar to physically ground Iranian aviation. On September 21, the Treasury issued a blunt warning to the global aviation industry: any foreign airport, fuel provider, or maintenance crew that services sanctioned Iranian airlines risks being hit with U.S. secondary sanctions.

On September 23, the brief grace period under General License 37, which had allowed foreign companies to wind down business with designated aviation support entities, expired. In plain terms: if a foreign airport refuels an Iranian passenger jet today, that airport’s parent company could be severed from the American financial system.

2. Rehabilitation Round I: The Post-Assad Syrian Financial Revolution

On September 24 and 25, the Treasury officially deleted a key Syria-specific general license from its terrorism regulations. In bureaucratic terms this sounds like a minor technicality. In reality it is the official end of an era.

For nearly half a century, Syria was branded a State Sponsor of Terrorism. That label did not just give Damascus a bad reputation; it acted as a legal tripwire that automatically banned foreign aid, defense trade, and major financial transactions. Because the U.S. officially stripped Syria of that designation in August, following the overthrow of the Assad regime, the old general licenses that offered narrow, strict exceptions to the embargo are no longer needed.

By deleting this rule, the Treasury is cleaning up its books to reflect a new reality: the U.S. economic blockade on Syria is over. Washington is signaling to American and global businesses that they can finally participate in rebuilding the country without fear of U.S. prosecution.

3. Rehabilitation Round II: Doing Business in Syria, Really?

Opening Syria to foreign investment and trade could be good news for Syria, the Middle East and the wider Western world, as long as President Ahmed al-Sharaa is able to sustain the country’s westward momentum and his disassociation from old friends. Businessmen may want to rush to explore opportunities in this terra nullius, but the financial system will probably remain cautious to an extent that hampers their endeavors.

Avi Vishnevich, Senior Research Fellow at CENTEF and former senior official at the Bank of Israel and the Prime Minister’s Office, suggests in a series of new articles a comprehensive financial-integrity ecosystem that engages all participants in the governance and control environment surrounding correspondent banking, to ensure that correspondent banking networks can distinguish legitimate commercial activity from illicit financial flows.

The research also calls for the gradual development of internationally harmonized prudential frameworks, recognizing that severe terrorism-financing and sanctions-related failures constitute systemic risks capable of threatening global financial stability. The first article in that series introduces an explicit Terrorism-Financing and Sanctions-Evasion Capital Buffer in the banking sector.

4. Gross Ignorance: The Houthi Blind Spot

This brings us to the most glaring anomaly of the week. While the Treasury was busy tightening the screws on Iranian logistics and Iraqi proxy militias, it issued zero new terror finance designations against the Houthis.

That silence is deafening when you consider what happened days earlier, as we covered in a previous issue. By mid-September the Houthis had executed a large and successful military offensive, capturing the historic port city of Mocha, Perim Island, and the Hanish Islands. By seizing that Yemeni territory, the Houthis established a direct, physical chokehold over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a 20-mile-wide maritime bottleneck at the bottom of the Red Sea through which up to 14 percent of global trade flows. Despite the Houthis taking direct control of one of the most vital shipping arteries on the planet, and displacing tens of thousands of civilians in the process, the U.S. sanctions pen stayed dry this week.

The contrast is striking. Washington has built a highly effective, rapid-fire sanctions machine to dismantle Iranian governance while rapidly rewriting decades of law to reward a transitioning Syria. Yet when faced with a catastrophic Houthi power grab over global shipping lanes, with visible repercussions on energy flows, the U.S. financial weapons have, at least so far, stayed holstered. Whether this reflects a deliberate policy pause, behind-the-scenes negotiations, or simply a lack of effective financial targets left to hit in Yemen, it remains the biggest geopolitical question of the month.

CENTEF ANALYSIS  ·  23 September 2026

On September 23, the IDF eliminated Muhammad Abu Alwan, for a decade the head of Hamas’s finance department and probably one of its two top financial managers. Abu Alwan was responsible for moving more than $300 million to fund the group’s operations against civilians. For the Israeli military and the Shin Bet, this was a textbook tactical victory. It demonstrated precise, actionable intelligence, removed a highly experienced financial terrorist, and hampered the mechanism he ran to supply the Hamas terror machine.

Zoom out from the immediate operational success, however, and the long-term efficiency of trying to bomb a financial network into submission becomes questionable. Targeting a terror organization’s CFO is fundamentally different from targeting its militant commanders. Hamas’s financial ecosystem is not a corporate treasury reliant on a single visionary leader. It is a decentralized, resilient web of sources, such as state sponsors, charities, crowd-funding, crime and taxes; of underground money channels, such as money changers, hawala brokers, fintech platforms and cryptocurrency; and of cross-border smuggling routes carrying cash, fiat over fintech, and liquidity laundering. History in the region shows what happens next: the ledger simply gets passed to the next deputy in line.

Taking out a terrorist like Abu Alwan is justified, but it is no more than a localized fix to a globalized problem. On the long-term counter-terror-finance vector, it causes temporary administrative chaos and forces the network to scramble. Suffocating a deeply entrenched organization’s financial mechanism requires strategic moves to crush the decentralized infrastructure, and to seriously deal with sources, channels and uses.

ALSO THIS WEEK

Qatar Says Its Aid Did Not Fund Hamas

TIMES OF ISRAEL  ·  Week of September 21, 2026

Qatar has denied allegations that its monthly cash payments to Gaza, which began in 2018, helped fund Hamas’s military wing before the October 7, 2023 attack. A recent New Yorker article citing papers seized by Israel reported a Hamas leader describing the Qatari grant as the main artery of the movement. Qatar denied the allegations and said the money was directed to Palestinian civilians and coordinated with Israeli authorities and international partners. If any of it reached the Al-Qassam Brigades, Qatar said, the fault lies with Israeli governments, including those of Benjamin Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. The payments reportedly ran up to $30 million per month and were intended to prevent a humanitarian disaster and maintain calm in Gaza.

In the case of hybrid terror organizations, those that control a territory and its population, every working position given to a citizen is attributed to the ruling terror organization, every monthly paycheck has them to thank for, and every item of grocery bought to feed the family was permitted by them. In such an extreme totalitarian environment, can anyone really distinguish between terror financing and any other kind of financing? Yes, these are extreme situations, but sadly not rare ones. Take a look at Iraq under ISIS, Gaza under Hamas, Iran under the IRGC, and southern Lebanon under Hezbollah. How to help the suffering population without strengthening the terrorist organization is a question we may try to answer in the coming weeks. Follow us to learn more.

About this brief. Terror Finance Weekly is compiled by CENTEF from open-source reporting and primary government releases for research and situational-awareness purposes. Items reflect developments published between September 21 and 27, 2026. Allegations described in designation notices and indictments are the issuing authority’s findings and carry a presumption of innocence unless proven in court. Reporting is attributed to the outlets named; the judgments drawn from it are CENTEF’s own. Headlines link to source material where available.