Treasury sanctions Palestine Action, an Italian server collective and Masar Badil

The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned three organisations on 26 August under Executive Order 13224. The list is Palestine Action, based in Britain; Autistici/Inventati, an Italian collective that hosts digital tools for activists; and Masar Badil, which Treasury said operates as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, already a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Two Masar Badil leaders were named with the group.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said "far-left extremists, their fronts, and their enablers should be on notice." The department tied the move to the 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, which lists violent far-left groups as one of three main terrorist threats, and to a November 2025 State Department action against antifascist networks.

OFAC said Palestine Action had, since 2020, supported acts that injured British officers and caused millions of dollars of damage at military sites, and that it had promoted similar tactics inside the United States and along the Mexican border. The group was proscribed in Britain in July 2025 after members broke into an RAF base and sprayed red paint on two aircraft. Co-founder Huda Ammori called the U.S. step a wake-up call on free speech.

What the label does, and what it is not

An OFAC listing under EO 13224 freezes any U.S.-controlled assets and makes it a civil or criminal risk to give the designees money or services. It is not the same as a State Department Foreign Terrorist Organization listing. The UN human rights office under Volker Türk said on 27 August that the designation looked like "a disproportionate and unnecessary restriction" on expression, assembly and association, and that an expansive use of "terrorism" chills civic space. It had already criticised the British ban. Israel's foreign ministry welcomed the U.S. action.

The British Supreme Court has said it will hear an appeal against a lower-court ruling that upheld the UK proscription. That case and the U.S. sanctions now sit on the same set of facts and on two different legal systems.