On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Palestine Action, a UK organization proscribed as a terrorist group in July 2025. The designation also included the transnational group Masar Badil and the Italy-based digital services provider Autistici Inventati as part of a broader action against the growing threat of violent far-left terrorism.
Palestine Action was founded in 2020 by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard as a UK-based direct-action group. It describes itself as targeting “corporate enablers of the Israeli military-industrial complex” to “make it impossible for these companies to profit from the oppression of Palestinians.”
The group has targeted Israeli and Western defense manufacturers, a global logistics firm, a British military base, the office of a pro-Israel advocacy organization, a university, and a golf resort owned by President Trump.
Since its founding, the group has forced the permanent closure of Elbit’s Oldham factory and pushed the company to abandon its London headquarters. In 2021, American activist Max Geller was arrested in Kent for chaining himself to a van outside an Elbit-owned weapons factory. In 2022, the group attacked a factory in Glasgow, causing what UK officials later described as millions of dollars in damage.
In May 2023, activists broke into the Kuehne + Nagel offices at Leicester’s Meridian Business Park. They spray-painted the building and dismantled equipment, including phones and computers. In a separate action, a man drove to the gate of Elbit’s UAV Tactical Systems factory with his hands glued to the steering wheel while a woman locked herself inside the car. The protest camp at the site brought the total number of arrests to 43.
In May 2024, activists at the same business park rammed a truck through the factory’s perimeter fence. They climbed onto the roof, broke through it with tools, and sprayed red paint across the building. Seven people were arrested.
On August 6, 2024, seven people aged 20 to 51 broke into Elbit’s Filton facility near Bristol. They were charged with criminal damage, violent disorder, and aggravated burglary. One was also charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent for allegedly striking a police officer with a sledgehammer.
The turning point in the group’s legal status came on June 20, 2025, when two activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire on electric scooters. They sprayed red paint into the turbine engines of two Voyager aircraft and caused further damage with crowbars. Police initially estimated the damage at roughly £7 million, although court proceedings later placed it at £1.7 million, with the potential to rise to nearly £15 million.
Counterterrorism police arrested several suspects days later. They were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage and conspiracy to enter a prohibited place for purposes prejudicial to UK interests. Prosecutors argued that the offenses had a terrorist connection.
That same week, the UK government announced that it would ban Palestine Action under anti-terrorism law, citing the Brize Norton incident and the 2022 Glasgow attack. Parliament approved the proscription on July 2, 2025, making membership in or support for the group punishable by up to 14 years in prison. The group ceased UK operations immediately after the ban took effect.
Around the same time, Palestine Action Germany broke into Elbit’s weapons factory in Ulm. Five activists were arrested without resistance, and the case was transferred to Germany’s Security and Counter-Terrorism Center. The U.S. Treasury Department later stated that related cells were also active in Spain, Ireland, and Poland.
In the three months following the UK ban, more than 1,600 people were arrested in connection with support for the group. Of those, more than 1,200 were charged under the UK Terrorism Act simply for attending rallies supporting the group.
In January 2026, five defendants, Amy Gardiner-Gibson, Jony Cink, Daniel Jeronymides-Norie, Lewis Chiaramello, and Muhammad Umer Khalid, pleaded not guilty to the Brize Norton charges. Their trial at the Old Bailey is scheduled for January 2027 and is expected to last up to eight weeks.
On February 13, 2026, the UK High Court ruled the ban unlawful in a case brought by co-founder Huda Ammori, who said the ban had “backfired.” The government appealed, and the UK Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
At the subsequent trial of the 6 defendants charged in connection with the 2024 Filton raid, Charlotte Head testified that she and her co-defendants wanted to “cause as much property damage as we could.” In May 2026, four defendants, Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, and Fatema Rajwani, were convicted of criminal damage, while the other two were acquitted. Prosecutors had already dropped the violent disorder charges against all six, who had also been acquitted of aggravated burglary.
By June 2026, the four convicted activists faced terrorism-related sentencing, despite the jury convicting them only of criminal damage. A related case against seven alleged coordinators of the same raid, charged under the joint enterprise doctrine, ended in July 2026. Jurors were discharged after 35 hours of deliberation without reaching verdicts on most counts, although one person was convicted of criminal damage by a 9-1 majority.
Regarding the designation of the groups under Executive Order 13224, the post-9/11 counterterrorism authority, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the department’s announcement that “far-left extremists, their fronts, and their enablers should be on notice,” adding that Treasury would “cut the financial lifelines of these groups until they are eliminated.”
The action followed remarks Bessent made at a July 2026 “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” and built on a November 13, 2025, State Department action against Antifa-linked groups. Treasury presented the designations as part of the 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, which identifies violent far-left terrorism as one of three major terrorist threats facing the country.
Treasury stated that Palestine Action “has promoted its violent, criminal, and terrorist acts on social media, encouraging the use of similar tactics internationally, including within the United States and along the U.S.-Mexican border.”
The release also described Masar Badil as a front for the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which the United States and Canada sanctioned in October 2024 as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Treasury also designated two Masar Badil leaders, Germany-based Zaid Abdulnasser and Brazil-based Rawa Alsagheer.
Separately, Treasury said Autistici Inventati had provided hosting, encrypted email, and communications tools to vetted far-left groups, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a U.S.-, UK-, and EU-designated terrorist organization.
Citing its own guidance, Treasury noted that the United States “does not sanction persons for engaging in political speech or other constitutionally protected activities.”
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said the designations were intended to “silence the many” by “targeting a few,” while Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed called the move an attempt to protect Israel from accountability.
Supporters of the designation cite the group’s documented pattern of property destruction, factory raids, and the Brize Norton military base breach as justification for treating its tactics as national security matters rather than ordinary protest.
With the UK Supreme Court appeal pending and the Old Bailey trial scheduled for January 2027, Palestine Action’s legal status remains unresolved in Britain, while the U.S. designation remains in force.
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