The U.S. has charged Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and several other prominent figures in the group over their involvement in a deadly attack in Israel on October 7th last year. The Justice Department announced indictments against six Hamas members, including seven charges such as the murder of dozens of U.S. citizens, conspiracy to finance terrorism, and use of weapons of mass destruction. The charges span decades of alleged Hamas attacks, including last October’s unprecedented assault.

While this marks the first legal action by U.S. authorities to hold the orchestrators of that attack accountable, experts see it as largely symbolic, particularly since some of those named are already deceased. Sinwar is believed to be hiding in tunnels beneath Gaza.

In a video statement on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland stated that the defendants were behind “financing and directing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and threaten U.S. security.” He added that the group also “spearheaded Hamas’s efforts to destroy the state of Israel and target civilians to achieve that goal.”

Garland emphasized the brutal nature of the October 7th attack, calling it “the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” where Hamas “murdered entire families,” targeting the elderly and young children, and committed acts of sexual violence against women.