The Holy Land Foundation was America's largest Muslim charity when the government shut it down in December 2001 and prosecuted its leaders for material support — not for funding violence, which was never alleged, but for charity to Palestinian zakat committees that the government itself, and USAID, had dealt with. The first trial ended in a hung jury; at the 2008 retrial, featuring an anonymous Israeli intelligence "expert" no defense could confront, all five were convicted.

Ghassan Elashi and Shukri Abu Baker received sixty-five years; Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain, terms of fifteen to twenty. The five — men who fed orphans through committees never designated as terrorist — became the Palestine movement's central prisoners, their case cited across the civil-liberties spectrum as the criminalization of Muslim charity itself.