A Palestinian girl stands near a poster of Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, one of the main terrorist groups present in the West Bank operating under the ruling Fatah party, who was killed by Israeli troops in August 2022. The poster bears the Samidoun logo. (Photo by JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP via Getty Images)
Introduction
Anti-Zionist group Samidoun (derived from the Arabic word for “steadfast”) is a self-described solidarity network for Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons. In October 2024, the U.S. and Canadian governments sanctioned Samidoun as a "sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for The Popular Front for The Liberation of Palestine" (PFLP), a designated terror group in the U.S., Canada, the European Union, Israel, and Japan.
On October 15, 2024, the U.S. Department of the Treasury added Samidoun to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN List) after determining that Samidoun is owned, controlled, directed by, or has acted for or on behalf of the PFLP.
The Department also added Khaled Barakat, a member of the PFLP’s leadership and among Samidoun's leaders, to the SDN List for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the PFLP. The Department’s designations allow the U.S. government to block the assets of entities and individuals that provide support, services, or assistance to, or otherwise associate with, terrorists and terrorist organizations, as well as their subsidiaries, front organizations, agents, and associates. Financial institutions and individuals who engage in certain transactions or activities with sanctioned entities and individuals may also be subject to civil or criminal penalties as well as other enforcement actions.
Canada -- where Samidoun maintains its offices -- also added the group to its list of terror entities under the Canadian criminal code.
Israel designated Samidoun as a terror organization and an arm of the PFLP in 2021. Germany banned Samidoun's operations in October 2023, following the October 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
Samidoun first emerged in 2011 following a coordinated hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners led by the PFLP. Its chapters in the U.S., Canada and other Western countries have campaigned on behalf of Palestinians imprisoned in those nations, including those arrested or convicted for alleged involvement in terror activity or “direct actions" for Palestinians.
Samidoun also operates a chapter in Iran.
Samidoun’s ideology and leadership
The organization has routinely touted its explicit support for those convicted or accused of terrorism and acts related to terrorism, like PFLP’s Walid Daqqa and Rasmea Odeh, making it among more extreme groups within the Palestinian activist movement in the lead-up to its U.S. designation.
A Samidoun banner with the slogan ”Long live October 7th." (Source: Telegram)
In protests, articles, webinars and other events, Samidoun has praised the October 7 attack, supported the full ostracization of “Zionists“, claimed that “Zionist forces” have “no soul” and demanded the end of the “Zionist project.” The organization has also supported the activities of organizations like the Houthis, a US-designated Yemen-based terror group also known as “Ansar Allah”, or “supporters of God,” and backed by the Iranian regime.
Samidoun encourages engagement with the radical antisemitic, anti-Zionist English-language Telegram channel Resistance News Network (RNN), which regularly features pro-Hamas propaganda and violent anti-Israel imagery. In 2024, the group sponsored two webinars with Hamas officials including Husam Badran, a Hamas spokesperson, and Ghazi Hamad, a senior member of Hamas’s political leadership.
Charlotte Kates, Samidoun’s Canada-based international coordinator, also claims to have held meetings in South Africa with local government ministers and representatives of Hamas’s leadership, including Basem Naim, as well as Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials. These meetings took place before South Africa filed its case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in late 2023 accusing Israel of genocide
In early August 2024, Kates traveled to Tehran to accept a "human rights" award from the Iranian regime, an accolade that was also bestowed on the secretary-general of terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Iran in late July 2024, was also honored at the event.
Samidoun International Coordinator Charlotte Kates tells Canadian media she was "proud" to receive the Iranian award, from her home in Vancouver, BC, August 2024. (Screenshot/Global News Canada)
Another prominent Samidoun leader is Khaled Barakat, a campaign coordinator who was born and raised in Jerusalem and became an active member of the PFLP. He is also Kates’s spouse. In interviews, Barakat has indicated that he moved to the US with his family as a child, living there for over a decade before relocating to Canada, where he and Kates now reside in the Vancouver area and where Samidoun was registered as a non-profit organization. He has also stated that he has lived in Lebanon.
In 2020, Barakat and Kates were deported from Germany and subject to a four-year ban. Two years later, the pair was denied entry to the Netherlands for a speaking event.
Barakat sometimes makes media appearances while in Beirut and has written for the pro-Assad and pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
Samidoun leader Khaled Barakat speaks to a Lebanese interviewer in Beirut for a show on the FreePalestine TV channel on Rumble, in October 2024. (Screenshot/YouTube)
In addition to Samidoun, Barakat is one of the founding leaders of Masar Badil, also known as the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, an extreme anti-Zionist international organization that hosts members of US-designated terror organizations including Hamas and the Houthis for webinars. Samidoun frequently cooperates with Masar Badil, sharing its events on Samidoun-run social media pages quite often.
Other Samidoun leaders include Mustapha Awad and Mohammed Khatib, both European coordinators for the group. Awad and Khatib are also believed to be affiliated with the PFLP and both reside in Belgium. In April 2024, the Belgian Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration called on immigration authorities to revoke Khatib’s refugee status, describing him “as an extremist hate preacher.”
In October 2024, Khatib was denied entry to the Netherlands for a speaking event at a university. In their statement announcing the ban, the Dutch ministers of justice and immigration said Khatib "legitimizes, condones and glorifies violence against the state of Israel, including violence by organizations on the European Union’s terrorism list," and "actively expresses support for terrorist organizations."
Funding
Samidoun is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alliance for Global Justice (AFJG), an Arizona-based organization that serves as a fiscal sponsor for a number of progressive and left-wing initiatives, including the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
A fiscal sponsor uses its 501c3 status to act as a passthrough for donations to sponsored projects. This can allow sponsored groups to be less transparent with respect to their funding.
Support for the October 7 terror attacks
When the news broke of Hamas’s terror attack on October 7, Samidoun released an effusive statement in support of armed “Palestinian resistance," including explicitly praising Hamas’ invasion of Israeli towns and the abduction of civilians to use as hostages.
A composite image of social media posts published by Samidoun.[Sources from left: Instagram post (since deleted), Telegram, Instagram story]
Alongside the statement, Samidoun posted an image of individuals carrying weapons and added, in part: “The resistance is rising throughout occupied Palestine, smashing the siege on Gaza…as Palestinian resistance forces fight to advance return and the liberation of Palestine.”
Since October 7, the group has repeatedly endorsed the mass terror attack, and similar rhetoric has been seen at events facilitated or co-sponsored by Samidoun.
At a June 10, 2024 rally in New York City, a flag was seen bearing the Samidoun logo with the slogan “long live October 7.” At the same rally, a Samidoun banner can be seen prominently next to a Hezbollah flag.
A Samidoun flag is held at a June 10, 2024 anti-Israel rally in New York City. A Hezbollah flag can be seen in the background. (Source: Samidoun NY/NJ Telegram)
Also in June 2024, Samidoun tweeted an image that included flags and symbols of Hamas’s Al Qassam’s Brigades (the group’s armed wing), Hamas leader and October 7 architect Yahya Sinwar, Hezbollah, the Lion’s Den, and the Houthis, along with their slogan, which reads in part “death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.”
In another June 2024 tweet, the organization criticized the New York Nova Exhibit, which commemorates the massacre of hundreds of innocent concertgoers by Hamas on October 7, and claimed that the exhibit was meant to "promote false atrocity tales and a Zionist disinformation narrative, specifically, which have long been debunked." Samidoun further engaged in denialism of the Oct. 7 attack, claiming: “From the false ‘mass rape’ narrative to the coverup of the IOF's ‘mass Hannibal event’, the exhibit aims to take an achievement of the resistance and smear it with vile fabrications. So yes, long live October 7, the material and symbolic representation of the road to the liberation of Palestine.... And long live the Intifada, and the revolution, until victory, return & liberation.”
In May 2024, Kates was arrested in Vancouver, Canada amid a criminal investigation into hate speech following a public appearance in which she praised the October 7 attack as “heroic and brave.”
In March 2024, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) hosted a webinar featuring Kates, Barakat and Within Our Lifetime leader Nerdeen Kiswani. Kates praised Hamas as “the people that are on the frontlines, defending Palestine and fighting for its liberation.” She said: "… the fact is that Hamas is a mass Palestinian movement that is in a leadership role in the Liberation Struggle right now. And there is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas.”
Barakat praised the “tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in”, such as “hijacking airplanes”, noting that “if it wasn't for these tactics, we would [have] never heard of Leila Khaled, for example, and other Palestinian women who led these kinds of heroic operations that introduced the Palestinian questions to the world.” Leila Khaled is a longtime active leader of the PFLP and is well-known for her role in the hijacking of two civilian airliners, TWA Flight 840 in 1969 (bound for Tel Aviv from Rome) and El Al flight 219 in 1970 (traveling from Amsterdam to New York City).
Kates and Barakat also appeared on a webinar in February 2024, co-sponsored by Samiodun, the World Workers Party and the Bronx Antiwar Coalition, on which they expressed sympathy for Hamas. In describing the "fantastic military operation" of October 7, Kates referred to the hostages taken by Hamas and other groups on October 7 — which included an infant, children, and elderly people — as "prisoners of war" with no distinction made between soldiers and civilians. Barakat claimed that Israeli hostages "were treated as human beings.”
On the same webinar, Barakat also dehumanized Israelis, stating, "This is a society that is fascist. The vast majority of Israelis are racist. The vast majority of Israelis are a legitimate target of the Palestinian resistance."
Additionally, Barakat rejected the two-state solution, drawing on age-old antisemitic tropes of Jewish power by deeming it as "a Zionist, capitalist plot to liquidate the Palestinian people struggling for their rights."
On October 7, the New York/ New Jersey chapter of Samidoun posted a story on Instagram stating, “Decolonization is not a theory, nor a poem. Decolonization is [a] bloody and violent process focused on the main value of the colonized person: THE LAND. This is the decolonization of Palestine, and it can’t be stopped. Glory to the rifle and revolution until victory.”
Samidoun flyers. (via the Samidoun site)
Even before October 7, the organization had long explicitly supported terrorism and “armed resistance.”
At an August 2020 anti-Israel rally co-hosted by Samidoun in New York City, three protestors held Hezbollah and PFLP flags. The event was also co-hosted by fellow extreme anti-Zionist groups Within Our Lifetime, Palestinian Youth Movement, NY4Palestine, and others.
In November 2021, Samidoun called on the British government to rescind its designation of Hamas as a terrorist group, arguing that “the listing of Hamas as a ‘terrorist’ organization not only aims to undermine the Palestinian resistance inside Palestine and anti-imperialist resistance throughout the region, it also aims to terrorize the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities in Britain and even supporters of justice for the Palestinian people.
In a May 2020 webinar, Barakat criticized non-violent activists and academics, charging that they “want the Palestinians to pay the entire price and then provide them with a one-state solution. Well, are they engaged in this struggle of Palestinians? Do they actually join Palestinian resistance? Do they provide the money for Palestinian resistance? Do they carry military operations along with their Palestinian comrades? Do they go to jail along with Palestinian comrades? Because this is the actual liberation process….”
