WASHINGTON

The US Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against senior Hamas leaders for their roles in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack in Israel, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday.

"The Justice Department has charged Yahya Sinwar and other senior leaders of Hamas for financing, directing and overseeing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States," said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

"The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations. These actions will not be our last," he added.

The indictment, the first of its kind from the Justice Department, targets five high-ranking Hamas officials including Sinwar, who is reportedly hiding in tunnels in Gaza, and Ismail Haniyeh, the late head of Hamas’s political bureau who was assassinated in the Iranian capital Tehran on July 31, with charges ranging from terrorism to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and conspiracy to murder US nationals outside the US.

Other defendants facing charges are Mohammad Al-Masri, Marwan Issa, Khaled Meshaal and Ali Baraka.

According to CNN, citing a Justice Department official, the charges were initially filed on Feb. 1, 2024 but remained sealed to allow for the possibility of arresting any of the defendants

The announcement came after the recovery of the bodies of six Israeli hostages, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, in Gaza this weekend. Around 250 hostages were taken to Gaza following the cross-border attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7 last year.

Last November, under a deal, 105 hostages were released in exchange for a week-long truce and the release of around 240 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, most of whom had not been convicted of a crime.

Israel said it believed 108 hostages were still being held in Gaza, with roughly one-third of them presumed dead.

More than 9,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails, with 3,323 of them held without trial or charge, according to the Israeli human rights group the Center for the Defense of the Individual (HaMoked).

More than 40,800 Palestinians have been killed during Israel's war in Gaza since last October, most of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

A total of 1,139 people were killed in the cross-border attack led by Hamas on Oct. 7, according to Israeli figures.

An ongoing blockade of Gaza has caused severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine, leaving much of the region in ruins.

Israel faces accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which has ordered a halt to military operations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians had sought refuge before the area was invaded on May 6.