Ghassan Elashi

Ghassan Elashi (born 19 December 1953) is a Palestinian-American businessman who was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to prison in 2009 for his work with the Holy Land Foundation, a group that was designated by the United States as a terrorist organization in 2001. Elashi had also served as vice president of InfoCom Corporation, an internet company based in Richardson, Texas.

Holy Land Foundation

In 1990 Elashi, along with Shukri Baker and Mohammad Elmazain, founded the charitable group Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). As a charity, its mission was to provide aid for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Jordan. Following Israel's deportation of 413 Palestinians across the Lebanese border in December 1992 the HLF provided food and tents for their hillside encampment. In 1995 the HLF expanded its relief work to other areas including Bosnia, Albania (where their bakery supplied bread for US troops), Chechnya, Turkey and parts of Africa. The HLF was the first Texas-based group to send funds to Oklahoma following the 19 April 1995 bombing, as well as blood donations and fifty volunteers fundraising. During the years 2000–2001 the HLF raised $13,000,000, making it the largest Muslim charity in the US. On 4 December 2001 President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13224 closing the HLF. On 27 July 2004 Ghassan Elashi along with other senior members of the HLF were arrested in dawn raids by the FBI.

Four of the five Elashi brothers were arrested on 18 December 2002; Ihsan Elashyi was already in federal custody on an unrelated charge. The export violation referred to 4 computers and a printer that had been found in Libya. The second charge referred to a $250,000 investment belonging to Ghassan's cousin who was married to a Hamas leader. Ghassan was released with restrictions on his movements, his brothers, who were not US citizens, were held in solitary confinement for 18 months.

In a second trial that concluded in November 2008 (the first had ended in a mistrial), Elashi was convicted of terrorism financing crimes related to financial dealings with the Palestinian group, Hamas. He and his co-defendants contended that the Holy Land Foundation funded only legitimate humanitarian projects in Palestinian territories.

Conviction In July 2004, Elashi and his four brothers were convicted of export-control violations arising from illegal computer shipments to Libya and Syria, which were then designated by the United States as state sponsors of terrorism. In a separate trial in April 2005, Ghassan, Bayan and Basman Elashi and InfoCom Corporation were convicted of conspiring to deal in the property of Mousa Abu Marzook, a Hamas leader who had been designated a terrorist by the United States, and of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Ghassan Elashi was additionally convicted on ten substantive counts of dealing in the property of a designated terrorist and nine counts of money laundering. In October 2006, he was sentenced to 80 months in prison.

The first Holy Land Foundation trial ended in a mistrial in 2007, but Elashi and his co-defendants were convicted after a retrial in November 2008. In May 2009, Elashi was sentenced to 65 years in federal prison for his role in providing financial support to Hamas.

In December 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed Elashi's conviction and sentence. The court's opinion summarized evidence that Elashi was a member of a U.S. Palestine Committee headed by Hamas political leader Mousa Abu Marzook and that Elashi attended an October 1993 meeting in Philadelphia at which participants discussed opposition to the Oslo Accords and continued support for Hamas, while using “Samah”—Hamas spelled backwards—as a coded reference to the organization. The court also noted that the defendants did not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence supporting their convictions.

Elashi was originally housed at Federal Correctional Institution, Seagoville, to allow the convicted men to stay in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex so the convicts could aid their lawyers with their appeals. On 20 April 2010, U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis ended the requirement, facilitating their move to more secure facilities. In addition the men were required to speak English when talking with outsiders. Elashi was moved to a more secure prison in Illinois. Elashi, Federal Bureau of Prisons #29687-177, is serving his sentence at Federal Correctional Institution, Beaumont.

Response The non-governmental organization Charity & Security Network has charged that the convictions send a "chilling message" to US NGOs, in part because they are uncertain how to determine which charities are acceptable. One indication of that uncertainty, the group states, is that the charitable committees that Holy Land was convicted of working with were never "placed on the U.S. government's list of organizations supporting terrorism." The families of Elashi and Shukri Abubaker maintain that their convictions were wrong and that they have suffered unjust long-term imprisonment. In 2022, a joint statement by U.S. and international civil- and human-rights organizations and individuals, published on the Human Rights Watch website, called on the Biden administration to pardon the five defendants. The statement criticized the prosecution's reliance on Israeli intelligence and pseudonymous witnesses and argued that the case had been politically motivated.

Personal life Ghassan Elashi was born on 19 December 1953 in a suburb of Gaza City. In 1958 he moved to Riyadh where his father was working for the Riyadh Bank. After one year in a local school he was sent to a boarding school in Egypt for a year before returning to Gaza City to live with his grandparents. In June 1967 he was visiting his parents when the war broke out. Unable to return to Gaza he finished his education in Cairo. In 1972 he was able to visit Gaza on a tourist visa. In 1978 he enrolled in an English-language program in Cleveland, Ohio, and then studied accounting at Kent State University. While there, he established the first Muslim Student Organisation. A year later he transferred to the University of Miami where he completed his master's degree in accounting in 1981. In March 1985 he married Majida, from Yatta, with whom he had three daughters and three sons. The couple moved to Los Angeles where he and his brother founded a company, International Computer and Communications Inc. In 1988 the company had annual sales of $300,000 and by 1995 sales had grown to almost $5 million.

In 1992 the family moved to Richardson, Texas where the brothers started a new company, InfoCom. Amongst InfoCom's contracts was one for streaming al-Jazeera TV Arabic channel and hosting their website.