Austria Holds Gaza Now Founder Mustafa Ayyash in Pre-Trial Detention Under Anti-Terror Statute

Mustafa Ayyash founded Gaza Now as an online forum in 2006. By late 2023, after Israel's assault on Gaza began, the Telegram channel he ran had grown from roughly 350,000 subscribers to nearly 1.9 million, becoming one of the main sources of first-hand footage and information out of Gaza for journalists and researchers worldwide, according to Middle East Eye.

He has been in Austrian pre-trial detention since November 2025. No conviction is required for that to continue.

The legal mechanism is Section 278 of the Austrian criminal code, a provision that defines membership in a proscribed organization broadly enough to include someone who "takes part in its activities by providing information or assets, or in any other way, in the knowledge that this furthers the organisation or its criminal acts." Under that language, formal membership or participation in violent acts is not required for prosecutors to open an investigation, order surveillance, raid a home, or hold a person in detention, according to the report.

"The only terrorism trial to emerge from the operation, against a Vienna imam, ended in acquittal in June 2026, with the court finding that his sermons amounted neither to support for Hamas nor to incitement."

That line refers to Operation Luxor, the November 2020 raid in which more than 900 Austrian police officers searched roughly 70 homes and organizations linked to alleged Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas members. Then-interior minister Karl Nehammer called it a strike against "political Islam." Years later, not one of those investigations produced a conviction, and courts across Austria found the raids unlawful, according to Middle East Eye. The same statutory apparatus, the outlet reports, is now being applied to Palestinian media and solidarity networks.

Ayyash's path to detention ran through sanctions before it ran through a cell. In October 2023, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab labeled Gaza Now "Hamas-aligned." In March 2024, the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and the UK's Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation designated both the outlet and Ayyash, calling him a "key financial facilitator" of Hamas, a designation the article says rests on the channel's humanitarian donation appeals, which pointed donors to Western financial institutions and cryptocurrency accounts.

Austrian police raided Ayyash's home in April 2024, seized his devices, and questioned him and his wife, then released him. He kept traveling until a European arrest warrant issued in August 2025 led to his arrest at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport that September, and extradition to Austria two months later.

A video tied to this reporting documents the kind of first-hand footage from Gaza that built Gaza Now's following after October 2023, the material that made the channel, in Middle East Eye's words, "one of the most popular news outlets in Gaza." That reporting record is now the subject of a criminal case built on a statute amended in 2021 over the objections of Austrian civil society groups.