Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican seeking the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, and his fellow Senate GOP colleagues are seeking to refreeze $6 billion of Iranian funds that were unfrozen as part of a deal that freed U.S. prisoners in September.

The money, held in a Qatari bank and monitored by U.S. Treasury officials, has come under scrutiny after the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.

Iran has long backed Hamas financially, but U.S. and Israeli officials — including President Joe Biden — have continuously said since the fighting broke out that their countries’ intelligence services have yet to see evidence Iran was involved in the planning of the initial attack. Iran has denied involvement.

And top Biden administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, say none of the money, which is earmarked for humanitarian purposes, has been spent. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has also said that the administration told lawmakers that “a quiet understanding” had been reached with Qatar to not release the money for the time being.

“The Biden administration’s decision to release $6 billion to Iran – the world’s leading state sponsor of terror – was a grave mistake that created a market for American hostages, emboldened our adversaries, and put a credit on the balance sheets of one of Hamas’s biggest backers,” Scott said in a statement on Wednesday. “In the wake of Hamas’s horrific attacks on Israel, it has only become clearer that this rogue regime cannot be trusted as long they continue to support terrorist organizations.”

He introduced a bill to require the administration to keep the funds permanently frozen on Tuesday. Over two dozen senators have signed on, including Senate GOP leaders — like the party’s third-ranking senator in Wyoming’s John Barrasso, West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and Montana Sen. Steve Daines, who oversees his conferences’ electoral efforts — Iran hawks like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and two moderate senators from the Democratic side of the aisle: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.

Other Democrats like Montana Sen. Jon Tester, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey have also called for the $6 billion to be refrozen, but did not sign onto Scott’s bill. Those senators, along with Sinema and Manchin, are up for reelection next year.

“Money is fungible,” as Republicans and other critics of the prisoner deal have argued, as Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo and Tennessee Sen. Bill Haggerty did verbatim in their statements supporting Scott’s bill on Wednesday.

But while regaining their $6 billion in assets may have freed up money elsewhere in Iran’s budget, the State Department has said that Iran gives Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups around $100 million a year. The annual budget in 2022 for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — “Iran’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorist groups abroad,” according to a 2021 State Department report — was over $22 billion.

Still, Scott and other Republicans blame Biden for initially agreeing to release the $6 billion and want to punish Iran for the bloodshed in Israel and Gaza. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Scott’s fellow South Carolinian and presidential candidate, wrote in a New York Post op-ed on Tuesday that the U.S. “could stand with Israel to stop Iran tomorrow” without using American troops. Graham has said the U.S. should bomb Iranian oil refineries and eventually overthrow their government.

In the Senate on Tuesday on Tuesday, Rubio introduced a bill to block the importation of Iranian and Venezuelan oil, and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a far-right Iran hawk, sponsored a bill to end U.S. funding to the United Nations relief agency in Palestine until Iran is expelled from the U.N. and investigated for genocide. On the other side of the Capitol, House Foreign Affairs Chair Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, who said he was prepared to lead Congress in approving troops to be sent to Israel amid the war, introduced a bill similar to Scott’s on Monday. 

“I do not want to see six billion more dollars going into Iran to feed their terror operations across the Middle East,” McCaul said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” this weekend. “We don’t need to be sending $6 billion to Iran for God’s sake after what they just did to Israel. I think that is just egregious.”