When the guns fall silent, attention shifts. Ceasefires and de-escalation agreements are often treated as moments of relief, proof that pressure has worked and recovery can begin. But for terror networks, these moments mark the start of a different phase.
The threat doesn’t end with de-escalation; it moves into domains that receive far less scrutiny once the shooting stops.
While military campaigns disrupt fighters and weapons, they are far less effective at dismantling the financial systems that allow these organizations to survive interruption and regenerate over time.
In practice, these systems often reactivate faster than physical infrastructure and with far less visibility. As political attention turns toward diplomacy, reconstruction or deterrence, financial networks quietly resume operations: moving money, restoring logistics, and preparing for what comes next.
Post-conflict environments create a dangerous asymmetry. Borders tighten, arms transfers are scrutinized, and physical movement is constrained. Money does not play by the same rules. It moves through informal value transfer networks, front charities, commercial trade, and layered cross-border transactions designed to look legitimate. Even tightly monitored reconstruction and humanitarian funding can be exploited, providing cover for financial reorganization before violence resumes.
Terror financing
Hezbollah has repeatedly demonstrated this dynamic, rebuilding parallel financial and social infrastructures alongside military capabilities. In Gaza, Hamas has preserved civil and governance structures that maintain funding pathways even under intense pressure. Iran, despite sanctions and domestic strain, continues to finance, equip, and coordinate proxy forces across the region.
What links these actors is not ideology alone, but financial continuity. Without money, command fragments. With it, authority, loyalty, and operational capacity quietly return.
The rebuilding process is deliberately incremental.
Instead of large, suspicious transfers, networks disperse activity across hundreds of micro-transactions that blend seamlessly into everyday banking activity. These funds may move through charities, commercial entities, or seemingly ordinary businesses in high-risk regions. Each transaction appears benign on its own. The threat only becomes visible when patterns are examined over time and across borders.
This is where counterterror financing consistently falls short. Periods of active conflict tend to concentrate political, regulatory, and operational attention. When ceasefires or de-escalation phases follow, the perceived risk signal shifts, even though the underlying financial networks may not.
The post-ceasefire phase is often the time when dormant accounts are reactivated, front entities reappear, trade-based laundering resumes, and funding pipelines quietly reopen.
Cues, not pauses
This dynamic is especially relevant in the current global security environment. As the United States and several European countries mobilize naval and air assets as part of strategic signaling and deterrence postures, these actions are widely understood as measures of readiness rather than declarations of war.
But for terrorist and proxy networks, periods of heightened uncertainty are not pauses. They are cues. Financial resources are repositioned, access points are tested, and dormant funding channels are reactivated in anticipation of opportunity or escalation. Long before a shot is fired, money starts moving.
For financial institutions and regulators, the implications extend well beyond any single conflict zone. Terrorist financing routinely flows through mainstream global banking hubs, correspondent relationships, trade finance channels, digital payment systems, and increasingly crypto-enabled channels.
Unlike classic money laundering, the source of terrorist financing is often legitimate. The risk materializes at the destination, where fragmented financial activity converges into operational capability.
Legacy compliance systems are designed to flag known typologies. Most are not built to detect terrorist financing, and many institutions still treat sanctions screening as their primary counter-terrorism control. Post-conflict financing is engineered to defeat that logic: smaller transactions, dispersed networks, and behavior calibrated to stay below reporting thresholds. In most cases, institutions do not even realize they have been used.
The difficulty is compounded by the use of legitimate goods. Everyday commodities, such as medicine, furniture, clothes, construction materials, can all serve as cover for dual-user procurement, making illicit activity nearly impossible to distinguish at the transaction level.
This is where artificial intelligence becomes operationally essential, not just optional. AI is not a silver bullet. But without it, post-conflict financial activity is effectively invisible at scale. Advanced analytics can examine both ends of a transaction, identifying mismatches between declared beneficiaries and actual recipients. It can map networks across jurisdictions, detect coordinated micro-transaction behavior that traditional tools struggle to surface.
Critically, these systems learn over time. By recognizing evolving behavioral patterns rather than static rules, AI-driven approaches allow institutions to detect the re-emergence of illicit financial activity, even when individual transactions appear lawful. In post-ceasefire environments, this ability to identify signals early can mean the difference between disruption and missed risk.
Technology alone, however, is not enough.
This is a policy challenge as much as a technical one. Financial institutions cannot carry the burden in isolation. Effective disruption requires earlier intelligence sharing, deeper public-private coordination, and regulatory frameworks that treat post-ceasefire periods as moments of heightened financial risk, not normalization.
Terror networks do not demobilize financially; they reorganize. They test systems, probe blind spots, and rebuild patiently, knowing attention has shifted elsewhere. Organizations that wait for violence to resume before acting are not only reacting late but allowing the next phase of risk to take shape undetected.
The next conflict is often decided long before the first shot is fired, in the quiet period when money starts moving again. That is when terror networks reorganize.
Preventing the next phase of violence requires recognizing these patterns early and disrupting them while there is still time to act.
Yaron Hazan serves as VP Regulatory Affairs at ThetaRay. With over 25 years of experience in fighting financial crimes, he previously held the role of Lead investigator at the Israeli police for CTF cases, Manager of Forensics and Compliance at PWC and Head of Compliance at HSBC Israel. Yaron serves on the advisory board of the AI APAC Institute where his practical experience contributes to designing future regulations for AI.