Samidoun

Samidoun, formally the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, is an international advocacy network for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons that the governments of the United States, Canada, Germany and Israel have each designated a terrorist entity, on the finding that it was founded and is run by leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to raise money and recruit on that group’s behalf. The underlying cause it claims, that thousands of Palestinians sit in Israeli detention and deserve advocacy, is a real subject. The organization built to represent that cause is, on four governments’ findings, a PFLP shell.

Who runs it

Samidoun was founded in 2011, organized around a coordinated hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners that the PFLP led that year. Its international coordinator, Khaled Barakat, a Canadian citizen, is identified by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and by the US Treasury as a PFLP leadership figure operating abroad. His wife and co-coordinator, Charlotte Kates, previously worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild in the United States before relocating the operation’s public face to Canada. Two Belgium-based European coordinators, Mustapha Awad and Mohammed Khatib, are likewise described by both the Anti-Defamation League and NGO Monitor as PFLP-affiliated.

Structurally, Samidoun is not an independent charity. It has been a registered Canadian not-for-profit only since March 2021, and it raises money in the United States as a fiscally sponsored project of the Alliance for Global Justice, an Arizona-based nonprofit umbrella. That arrangement lets Samidoun collect tax-deductible donations while filing no financial disclosures of its own, a structure NGO Monitor and the Treasury Department both flag as designed to obscure where the money goes. It maintains chapters across the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

What the designations found

The four governments that have acted against Samidoun reached the same conclusion by separate routes:

Israel, February 2021: Samidoun designated a terrorist organization and an arm of the PFLP.
Germany, 2 November 2023: the Federal Ministry of the Interior, following Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s 13 October 2023 announcement that Samidoun had been “openly supporting terror against Israelis,” banned the organization outright and dissolved its German branch, which operated under the additional names Hirak and the Palestinian Youth Mobilization.
United States and Canada, 15 October 2024: in a coordinated joint action, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added Samidoun and Barakat to the Specially Designated Nationals list under Executive Order 13224, and Canada designated Samidoun a terrorist entity the same day. Treasury’s finding: Samidoun was “established by the PFLP” and functions as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser” for the group, which the US has listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997. Barakat was separately named for fundraising and recruitment on the PFLP’s behalf. No dollar figure was published with the designation, but the legal effect is total: US persons and banks are barred from any transaction with Samidoun, and its assets are frozen.

The PFLP itself is not a marginal front; it is the faction behind the 1972 Lod Airport massacre and decades of aircraft hijackings and bombings, and it remains listed as a terrorist organization by the US, EU, Canada, Israel and others.

The record it built

Samidoun’s public output goes beyond prisoner advocacy. ADL and NGO Monitor both document the network praising the October 7 massacre and celebrating Hamas and PFLP operations as “resistance,” and its events have honored PFLP-linked figures including Walid Daqqa, a PFLP member convicted in Israel for directing a 1984 kidnapping and killing, and Rasmea Odeh, convicted in Israel for the PFLP’s 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two Hebrew University students, and later convicted in the United States for immigration fraud after she concealed that record on her citizenship application. On North American campuses, Samidoun chapters and affiliated speakers co-hosted events with local Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and were, before the 2024 designations, listed as a resource by university-affiliated pages at institutions including CUNY and CalArts. Samidoun has also been active in BDS campaigns, framing boycott activism and prisoner solidarity as a single movement.

The propaganda and the response

Samidoun’s own statement on the 2024 sanctions denied any “material or organizational ties to entities listed on the terrorist lists of the United States, Canada or the European Union,” and cast the action as political retaliation for pro-Palestinian advocacy rather than a finding about its conduct. That is the organization’s standing defense across all four designations: that governments are criminalizing solidarity work, not addressing evidence. The Anti-Defamation League, which had shared intelligence on Samidoun with Congress and the administration before the Treasury action, welcomed the designation on the opposite premise, that an organization publicly celebrating a massacre and fundraising for a listed terrorist group is not engaged in ordinary advocacy. NGO Monitor, the Jerusalem-based watchdog that tracks funding and personnel links between NGOs and designated groups, reaches the same conclusion in its own profile, describing Samidoun plainly as “a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”

The grievance is real, Samidoun is not the answer to it

The underlying grievance Samidoun claims to represent is not manufactured from nothing. Israel holds several thousand Palestinians in detention at any given time, a portion of them under administrative detention orders that permit holding without formal charge, a practice that draws legitimate scrutiny from human rights monitors independent of Samidoun. But that grievance does not require Samidoun: other advocacy organizations pursue it without the PFLP ties that four governments have documented in Samidoun’s case. What the designations target is not the existence of the grievance but the organization’s own conduct: a leadership drawn from a listed terrorist group’s ranks, a funding structure built to obscure its sourcing, and public celebration of the same group’s attacks. Palestinian detention is a genuine policy question. Samidoun specifically has been found, independently, by governments across three continents, to be a front for one of the region’s oldest terrorist organizations, and the grievance does not launder that finding away.