Critics said the designation, based on a Bush-era 9/11 executive order, puts pro-Palestine civil disobedience on equal footing with Al-Qaeda, Julia Conley reports.
Protesting the banning of Palestine Action using anti-terrorism laws, Parliament Square, London, July 5, 2025. (Steve Eason, Flickr, CC BY-NC 4.0)
A top First Amendment advocacy group on Wednesday warned of the “broad speech implications” of the Trump administration’s sanctions on the British anti-genocide group Palestine Action, which it designated an international terrorist organization for leading direct actions in opposition to the Israeli government.
Under the designation, Americans will be blocked from doing business with Palestine Action, and providing the group with funds, goods, or services will be prohibited.
British citizens who continue to donate to the group or take part in protests supporting it — which thousands of people have been arrested for doing since the U.K. government proscribed Palestine Action last year — could face sanctions and visa bans in the U.S., according to The Telegraph, which first reported the news Wednesday that the U.S. designation was expected.
The group’s co-founders, Richard Barnard and Huda Ammori, will face lifetime bans from entering the U.S. due to the sanctions.
London police making an arrest during a demonstration against the proscription of Palestine Action, Sept. 6, 2025. (Alisdaire Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Chip Gibbons, policy director for Defending Rights and Dissent, said his group was “especially disturbed that Palestine Action, a nonviolent, direct action organization, has been sanctioned under a [President George W.] Bush-era executive order issued in response to the September 11th attacks, essentially putting civil disobedience for Palestinian rights on equal footing with al-Qaeda.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the sanctions of Palestine Action, along with sanctions targeting the Italy-based group Autistici Inventati — which supplies digital services to left-wing groups — and Masar Badil, a Palestinian organization.
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was imposing the sanctions under Executive Order 13224, which prohibits transactions between people in the U.S. and groups that commit or support terrorism.
“Far-left extremists, their fronts, and their enablers should be on notice: We will bring the full weight of our economic tools to bear,” said Bessent. “Political terrorism has no place in our society, and we will continue to cut the financial lifelines of these groups until they are eliminated.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, February 2025. (U.S. Department of the Treasury/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
The curtailing of Palestine Action’s ability to participate in the global financial system and its new U.S. label as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” group, said Gibbons, were not only “retaliation against the sanctioned for holding political views the Trump administration dislikes, but they severely curtail and criminalize U.S, citizens’ ability to engage in otherwise lawful associations with these groups.”
A U.S. official told The Telegraph before the sanctions were officially announced that Palestine Action had “supported numerous acts of terrorism since July 2020, including acts that have physically injured U.K. law enforcement personnel, as well as acts intended to intimidate lawful commercial enterprise and coerce the British government.”
The designation comes just over a year after U.K. lawmakers voted to proscribe Palestine Action after some of its members vandalized two aircraft at a Royal Air Force base.
In August 2024, activists with the group also raided a facility of Elbit Systems, an Israeli-owned weapons manufacturer, and attacked a police officer.
Organizers maintain that Palestine Action’s overarching goal is to demonstrate against and disrupt “the Israeli war machine, which is committing a genocide in Gaza with the support of the U.S. government,” as Ammori told Al Jazeera Wednesday.
They organized the recent actions to protest Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians since 2023 and is continuing to decimate the exclave despite a ceasefire reached last October.
Ammori added that President Donald Trump “has been at the center of the mass murder of Palestinians, enabling the Zionist regime at every turn.”
BREAKING: Trump has just designated Palestine Action a terrorist group.
As a Palestinian and Iraqi, the fact the country which destroyed both my homelands is calling me a terrorist, is beyond hypocritical.
Trump is the antithesis to everything Palestine Action stands for.
— Huda Ammori (@HudaAmmori) August 26, 2026
Many of the people arrested for supporting Palestine Action in the U.K. have been detained simply for holding signs that express opposition to genocide and solidarity with the group.
The new designation comes a month after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted representatives from more than 60 countries at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, where he warned that “for far too long… our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left,” and called for a global crackdown.
An elderly woman in hoisted into an awaiting police van while being arrested for holding a sign expressing support for Palestine Action on June 12, 2026 in the UK. (Alisdare Hickson / Flickr / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Rubio and top White House adviser Stephen Miller warned in July that numerous arrests and prosecutions of people and groups deemed by the administration to be left-wing extremists would be coming, under the guidance put forward by National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which called for a national strategy to crack down on left-wing organizing.
In the U.K., five Palestine Action organizers won a legal victory after a judge ruled that they would not be sentenced as terrorists, and three U.K. Supreme Court judges granted Ammori the right to challenge the government’s ban on the organization.
More than 250 academics and legal experts on Wednesday wrote to British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, calling on him to both end U.K. military support for Israel and to terminate the proscription of Palestine Action.
Julia Conley is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
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