Treasury lists Palestine Action with two other groups under the post-9/11 sanctions order

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Palestine Action on 26 August under Executive Order 13224, the post-9/11 order that freezes assets of designated terrorists and of people and entities that support them. The same package named Autistici/Inventati, an Italian digital-infrastructure group, and Masar Badil, which OFAC described as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an FTO since 1997. Two Masar Badil leaders were named as well.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said far-left groups and their enablers would face the department's economic tools. The 2026 U.S. counterterrorism strategy lists violent far-left organisations as one of three principal terrorist threats. The State Department targeted some antifascist networks on 13 November 2025. Wednesday's list is the next slice of that campaign.

What the designation does

An OFAC listing under E.O. 13224 is not the same as a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, which sits at the State Department. The practical effects still bite. Assets in the United States, or in the hands of U.S. persons, are blocked. Americans may not deal with the group. Providing funds, goods or services to it becomes a sanctions breach. That cuts the organisation off from dollar banking.

Britain proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000 in July 2025. OFAC said the group had, since July 2020, supported acts that injured UK officers, broken into military sites and damaged equipment, and promoted similar tactics in the United States and along the U.S.-Mexico border. The UK Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal against a lower-court ruling that the British ban was lawful.

Huda Ammori, a co-founder, said the group's work was aimed at disrupting Israeli defence production. Richard Barnard, the other co-founder, and Ammori both face lifetime U.S. entry bans under the sanctions logic described in British reporting.

The rights argument

The office of UN human rights chief Volker Türk called the U.S. step a disproportionate and unnecessary limit on expression, assembly, association and participation in public affairs. It said a wide use of the word terrorism chills civic space. The same office had criticised the UK ban. Israel's foreign ministry welcomed the American list.

The legal distinction matters for readers. FTO status triggers a separate criminal regime and immigration bars. OFAC's list is an economic freeze. For a small activist group that already cannot bank easily in Britain, the extra effect is to close dollar channels and to put any U.S. donor, host or web service on notice.

Marco Rubio told officials from more than 60 countries last month that Washington wants international counterterrorism work to spend more time on what he called far-left terror. Palestine Action is the first British left-wing campaign group to be pulled into that frame with American sanctions. How widely the same tool is used on other protest networks will decide whether Wednesday was a one-off pairing with the UK ban or the start of a longer list.