Macklemore Pledges $1M to Groups Accused of Hamas Ties After Ed Sheeran Tour Ouster

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Rapper Macklemore pledged $1 million in Ed Sheeran tour earnings to six Palestinian organizations — three of which appear in internal Hamas documents and others with alleged ties to terrorist groups — just days after being dropped from the tour over anti-Israel tirades where he proclaimed “Free Palestine” and accused Israel of “genocide.”

The move doubles down on the activism that cost Macklemore his remaining stadium dates. During September 4 and 5 appearances before tens of thousands at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, the keffiyeh-clad rapper accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide,” proclaimed “Free Palestine,” and performed his anti-Israel anthem “Hind’s Hall” as Gaza footage filled the massive screens behind him.

“A BIG PART OF THE REASON WHY I WANTED TO DO THIS TOUR IN THE FIRST PLACE IS SO I COULD STAND UP IN STADIUMS LIKE THIS AND SAY TWO WORDS: FREE PALESTINE.”

Days later, promoter Messina Touring Group removed Macklemore from remaining U.S. dates after venues warned they would not host the tour with him on the bill. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose Gillette Stadium was among them, said his objection was to Macklemore’s “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery” and failure to distinguish advocacy from rhetoric that harms Jews while obscuring Hamas’s October 7 massacre responsibility.

Macklemore answered his removal by pledging the entire $1 million he said he earned from Sheeran’s tour to six Palestinian organizations: the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), HEAL Palestine, Gaza Soup Kitchen, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), the UNRWA USA National Committee, and American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera).

Three of those groups — PCRF, MAP, and Anera — surface in internal Hamas security and intelligence records recovered in Gaza and declassified by Israel. The documents provide a window into how the terrorist organization monitored, restricted, and sought intelligence access to foreign NGOs operating under its rule.

PCRF appears repeatedly in the recovered Hamas records. A 2022 Hamas document identified PCRF as a donor to a Gaza rehabilitation association whose deputy board director and treasurer were themselves identified as Hamas-affiliated. Other records show PCRF operating under restrictions Hamas imposed on foreign medical delegations.

PCRF also has a much older connection to an organization at the center of the U.S. government’s landmark Hamas-financing prosecution: the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

Federal prosecutors said Holy Land Foundation provided approximately $12.4 million to Hamas and Hamas-controlled organizations while disguising the transfers as charitable assistance. The Justice Department said the Muslim Brotherhood — described by prosecutors as Hamas’s parent organization — created a Palestine Committee in the United States to support Hamas, with Holy Land Foundation becoming its chief fundraising arm.

Years before Holy Land Foundation and five of its leaders were convicted in 2008, a 1996 Dallas Observer report described Holy Land Foundation and PCRF founder Steve Sosebee jointly arranging a fundraising tour whose proceeds were split 60 percent to Holy Land Foundation and 40 percent to PCRF.

Sosebee remained at PCRF for more than three decades. Just over two weeks after the October 7 massacre, he promoted a television appearance about what he called “the genocide in Gaza.” Five days later, he wrote that then-President Joe Biden “supports genocide.” He later described the war as the “Schindler’s List phase of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

Sosebee left PCRF at the end of 2023 and launched HEAL Palestine the very next day — putting a second organization founded by the longtime PCRF chief among Macklemore’s six beneficiaries. Several former PCRF leaders subsequently moved into senior HEAL roles.

The Hamas files contain an even more direct allegation involving another Macklemore beneficiary, Medical Aid for Palestinians. A purported December 2022 Hamas Interior Ministry memo described MAP’s Gaza administrative director as “affiliated with Hamas,” said he had “pledged allegiance to its rule,” and classified him as working “in the positive” — terminology NGO Monitor says Hamas used for activity associated with its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

MAP also granted roughly $300,000 between 2019 and 2021 to the Abdel Shafi Community Health Association, which NGO Monitor says was founded and directed by senior members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Marxist terrorist organization notorious for decades of aircraft hijackings and attacks against Israelis.

MAP has rejected allegations of terrorist ties and says it maintains safeguards intended to prevent its assistance from reaching proscribed groups.

Anera’s project records show humanitarian programs coordinating beneficiary selection with Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Ministry of Social Development, while a separate purported 2021 Hamas intelligence document said a former Anera employee “used to work as an intelligence source” for a unit of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.

The Social Development Ministry was headed by senior Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad, the longtime spokesman who declared after October 7 that Hamas would repeat the attack “twice and three times” until Israel was destroyed.

Macklemore’s choice of the UNRWA USA National Committee follows an even longer financial trail. The U.S. nonprofit is legally separate from UNRWA but exists to raise money for the U.N. agency. It says it has sent nearly $80 million to UNRWA’s Gaza emergency fund since October 2023 and became the agency’s largest institutional donor worldwide.

That makes Macklemore’s chosen organization a direct fundraising channel to an agency at the center of a widening U.S. investigation into employees accused of serving Hamas and participating in October 7.

In June, the independent USAID Office of Inspector General referred 101 current or former UNRWA employees to the State Department over alleged participation in the October 7 attacks and affiliation with Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades. Investigators said one UNRWA teacher was allegedly a Hamas fighter ordered to bring two anti-tank missiles to a specified location on October 7. A deputy school principal allegedly served as an al-Qassam commander with communications responsibilities. Others allegedly served as Hamas commanders, intelligence operatives, and a sniper.

The investigation advanced again in August, when the State Department proposed debarments against three former UNRWA employees. USAID investigators said one former teacher and alleged Hamas military operative allegedly participated in kidnapping operations on October 7, while another former teacher allegedly received and held civilian hostages. A third was identified as an alleged Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative who allegedly entered Israel during the attack.

The personnel cases came alongside repeated Israeli findings of alleged Hamas activity inside and beneath UNRWA facilities. Among them, the IDF said troops raiding a compound serving as UNRWA’s Gaza City headquarters uncovered an alleged Hamas combat complex containing weapons, explosives, tactical drones, and surveillance and command equipment.

WHEN HE RELEASED “HIND’S HALL” AMID THE 2024 COLUMBIA ENCAMPMENTS, MACKLEMORE PLEDGED ALL STREAMING PROCEEDS TO UNRWA AND SEPARATELY MADE A $100,000 PERSONAL CONTRIBUTION.

For Macklemore, UNRWA is hardly a new beneficiary. When he released “Hind’s Hall” amid the 2024 Columbia University encampments, Macklemore pledged all streaming proceeds to UNRWA and separately made a $100,000 personal contribution. UNRWA USA later singled Macklemore out for helping “elevate and amplify” its mission. Its 2024 annual report shows more than $44 million in direct program allocations to UNRWA.

A fifth beneficiary, Gaza Soup Kitchen, carries another connection to that network: co-founder Hani Almadhoun is also UNRWA USA’s vice president of philanthropy.

Nor is this the first time Macklemore has raised money for several of the organizations now receiving his Sheeran-tour earnings. In September 2024 — less than a year after Hamas terrorists brutally massacred roughly 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251 others during the October 7 attack — Macklemore performed at Seattle’s “Palestine Will Live Forever” benefit, where admission proceeds were divided among UNRWA, HEAL Palestine, PCRF, and Pious Projects.

Macklemore’s rhetoric that night went considerably beyond humanitarian fundraising. He rapped about supporting the Palestinian “resistance,” declared there would “never be freedom by pleading with Zionists,” accused Israel of committing a “genocide” dating to 1948 — the year of the Jewish state’s founding — and then told the cheering crowd: “F**k America.”

Two years later, Macklemore took that activism into Sheeran’s stadium tour and openly told audiences that doing so was part of why he joined it. After the message cost him his remaining tour dates, he pledged the money he made inside those stadiums back to several of the same Palestinian organizations he had already spent years supporting.

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