DOES YOUR NEW YORK BANK HAVE HAMAS CLIENTS ?

Compliance officers at New York City-area banks would do well to examine their client lists, for the Palestinian Return Centre PRC, a UK NGO that has had consultative status at the United Nations since 2015, has at least three known Hamas officials as directors. Banks that cater to United Nations members should be especially concerned, because the NGO has UN identification documents, due to its status there, and new accounts staff at such banks may consider them to be a low-risk, even quasi-diplomatic entity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Hamas is a specially-designated global terrorist organization, under OFAC regulations, and its members are banned from any type of account relationship with any US entity or person. For the names of the specific individuals, and their sordid records as terrorists, see the white paper link at the end of this article*. Israel banned the Palestinian Return Centre, as a Hamas front organization, in 2010.

The entire premise of the PRC is flawed; Arabs who lived in the British Mandate of Palestine do not have any legally recognized "right to return" to the homes that they abandoned in 1948, on the advice of their leadership, which was allied with the six Arab countries who unsuccessfully attempted to wipe the newly-formed nation of Israel off the map, through a military invasion that failed.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, which recognized the ancient right of the Jewish People to their ancestral home, reserved the rights of other residents, but did not give them national rights in what is now Israel, and in 1920, the UK spun off 77% of the Mandate for the Arab nation of Jordan. Palestinian efforts to force the UK to "apologize" for Balfour are historically inaccurate, and frankly, insulting.

To return to the present, NYC bankers are invited to review the linked document, to insure that they are neither  the PRC, nor its Hamas leaders.
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*The Palestinian Return Centre