Treasury Sanctions Palestine Action, Italian Tech Collective, and Masar Badil in Widening Anti-Antifa Push

The Trump administration widened its financial war on far-left groups Wednesday, sanctioning three organizations and two individuals under Executive Order 13224, the counterterrorism authority created after September 11, 2001.

Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Italy-based Autistici/Inventati, UK-based Palestine Action, and the transnational group Masar Badil. Germany-based Zaid Abdulnasser and Brazil-based Rawa Alsagheer, identified as Masar Badil leaders, were sanctioned individually. All property they hold in the U.S. or under U.S. jurisdiction is now frozen, and Americans are barred from doing business with them.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent didn't mince words. "Far-left extremists, their fronts, and their enablers should be on notice: We will bring the full weight of our economic tools to bear," he said in a statement carried by multiple outlets including Breitbart and Reuters. "Political terrorism has no place in our society, and we will continue to cut the financial lifelines of these groups until they are eliminated."

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a parallel move the same day, telling Fox News Digital that "far-left terrorism poses a profound threat to the United States and the broader West" and that Autistici/Inventati is "a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world."

What the collective actually does

According to the State Department memo obtained by Fox News, Autistici/Inventati builds encrypted email, secure hosting, video conferencing, and anonymity tools through its "Noblogs" platform. The department says Portland-based Rose City Antifa used those tools to organize. It also says a media outlet on the same infrastructure has published communiques for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and that outlet was cited in the federal case against a man sentenced to 19 years for bombing a federal building and a police car.

Cuba Headlines' reporting adds that Autistici/Inventati describes itself as an "antifascist" and "anti-militarist" collective opposed to capitalism, and that its client list includes the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a group the U.S., UK, and EU have all designated as terrorist and which has been tied to deaths in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria since 1984.

Providing infrastructure to a PKK-linked network and to groups publishing IRGC and Hamas material is a serious allegation. If accurate, it represents a legitimate national security concern. Encrypted hosting used to coordinate violence differs substantially from encrypted hosting used to blog about politics.

The Palestine Action fight

Palestine Action's inclusion is the most contested piece. Britain banned the group in July 2025 under its Terrorism Act after members broke into military and defense sites, including an airbase where activists sprayed military aircraft with red paint, and repeatedly targeted Elbit Systems, Israel's largest defense contractor. A UK court struck the ban down in February 2026; an appeals court restored it in June, according to Breitbart and the Jerusalem Post. Britain's Supreme Court has agreed to hear a further appeal from co-founder Huda Ammori, who was granted permission to argue that then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper misapplied the law, according to the Jewish Chronicle.

Ammori rejected the U.S. designation outright. "The fact that the country which destroyed both my homelands is calling me a terrorist is beyond hypocritical," she said, according to the Jewish Chronicle. She told Reuters the group's activities "have always been about saving lives by disrupting the Israeli war machine," and called the U.S. move "a wake-up call to anyone who cares about free speech and civil liberties."

Palestine Action's legal status in Britain remains unsettled, with a Supreme Court hearing pending, and the group frames its actions as property damage in protest of arms sales, not attacks on people. Reasonable people can call spray-painting a jet vandalism rather than terrorism. The New Republic makes that argument forcefully, calling the move part of a "global crusade against left-wing organizations" and warning it criminalizes dissent.

Britain's own Court of Appeal ruled the ban a "justified and proportionate" restriction on speech rights, and Parliament voted to proscribe the group 385-26. The group's tactics, including break-ins at defense installations, go well past protest speech under any government's definition.

The bigger pattern

Masar Badil, the third designation, was already flagged by Treasury as a front for the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which the U.S. and Canada sanctioned in October 2024 for ties to the PFLP, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997. That link is the least controversial of the three.

Reuters reported that Rubio's July summit, which drew officials from more than 60 countries, sparked Democratic concerns that the administration is politicizing counterterrorism and diverting resources from other threats. No Democratic lawmaker's name or specific complaint was cited in the sourcing available, so that criticism remains a general characterization rather than an attributed, on-record objection.

Courts will determine whether OFAC's designation of a British protest group and an Italian web host will be treated similarly to how British courts have wrestled with Palestine Action's proscription, or whether U.S. judicial review lands somewhere different. Ammori's UK Supreme Court hearing is still pending, and no U.S. legal challenge to Wednesday's sanctions has been filed as of this writing.