Hind Rajab Foundation Raises Funds Through Stripe Despite Alleged Hezbollah Links
Stripe is processing donations for the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgian nonprofit whose leaders have faced allegations of Hezbollah ties and repeatedly praised U.S.-designated terrorist groups
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The Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgian nonprofit whose leaders’ public records include Dyab Abou Jahjah’s self-described involvement with Hezbollah and statements supporting or praising U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, is currently directing donations through Stripe. According to NGO Monitor, HRF “does not include any financial data, donor information, or sources of funding on its website, reflecting a complete lack of transparency and accountability.”
HRF co-founder and public leader Dyab Abou Jahjah said in a 2003 New York Times profile that he joined “the Hezbollah resistance against Israel” and received military training, training he said he remains “very proud of.” The payment arrangement raises questions about how Stripe evaluates adverse media and terrorism-financing risk, given that its platform is being used to collect donations for an organization led by figures with alleged links to a U.S.-designated terrorist group and known for pursuing lawfare campaigns against Israeli soldiers and officials.
Alleged Hezbollah Links and Extremist Associations
In February 2025, The Jerusalem Post reported, citing former Israeli defense officials and an Israeli-developed KYC and counterterrorism-financing system, that Abou Jahjah had family and business connections to people or companies associated with Hezbollah’s financing network. The paper separately reported that Abou Jahjah and Hassoun co-owned Bellezza BV, a Belgian company registered in 2020, and said it found no tangible business activity or online presence associated with the company
HRF co-founder Karim Hassoun co-founded the Arab European League (AEL) with Abou Jahjah in 2000. NGO Monitor, citing Jewish Insider and archived Belgian reporting, says AEL was behind multiple riots in the streets of Antwerp in the early 2000s, including violence against Jews and the burning of an effigy of an Orthodox Jew.
The AEL published a Holocaust-denial cartoon on its website in 2006 — which it said was meant to highlight double standards around free speech rather than deny the Holocaust — and was fined €2,500 by a Dutch appeals court in 2010. Hassoun has been photographed wearing a Hezbollah hat and has praised Samir Kuntar, who was convicted in Israel of murder for his role in the 1979 Nahariya attack, in which Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter Einat were killed. In 2009, Hassoun signed a petition urging European Parliament candidates to remove Hamas from terrorist organization lists.
Pattern of Extremist Statements
The foundation’s leadership has a documented history of extremist rhetoric. Abou Jahjah called the September 11 perpetrators “criminals” for killing civilians, but also said he and other Muslims experienced a “sweet revenge feeling” after the attacks. In 2003, he said he considered “every death of an American, British or Dutch soldier as a victory.”
De Standaard, a Belgian newspaper, ended his column in 2017 after he responded to a truck-ramming attack in Jerusalem that killed four Israeli soldiers with statements including “by any means necessary,” disputing that an attack on soldiers constituted terrorism. On September 25, 2024, Abou Jahjah stated that “in 2009, as director of the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine, I organized visits for Hezbollah’s political leadership to several European countries, including the UK.”
Hassoun’s social media activity reveals similar patterns. Shortly after the Hamas Oct 7th massacre, he wrote: “I condemn Hamas for not having taken 500 or 1000 hostages instead of just 200.”
HRF’s U.S. representative, Jake Romm, has also praised groups the U.S. has designated as terrorist organizations. In March 2025 — the same month the United States redesignated Ansar Allah, the Houthi movement, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization — Romm wrote that Hamas was “the only group meaningfully working to return the hostages,” and that Ansar Allah was the only group treating the Genocide Convention and the Responsibility to Protect with “sufficient respect,” arguing that its designation reflected problems with the international legal system.
Unanswered Questions for Stripe
Stripe says it applies KYC and customer-due-diligence procedures and screens users against applicable sanctions and restricted-party lists. Its policies also allow it to decline business relationships that it considers high-risk, even where the activity is not expressly prohibited by law. HRF’s continued access to the platform therefore raises questions about how Stripe evaluates adverse reporting, historical associations, and public statements involving an organization’s leadership.