U.S. Enforcement Against the European Hamas–Muslim Brotherhood Network Since October 7, 2023

On July 26, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it was designating a senior Muslim Brotherhood official named Mahmoud al-Abyari. 

Two things made this designation significant. One was that al-Abyari was targeted because of his Muslim Brotherhood links and not, as is more common, ties to its Palestinian offshoot, Hamas. Another was that al-Abyari was based in the United Kingdom, one of the United States’ closest allies.

The Trump administration is actively targeting the Muslim Brotherhood—it has now designated four branches—and wants European governments to assist in this endeavor by addressing their own domestic Muslim Brotherhood entities.

European governments have historically failed to craft coherent policies to combat the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposes the Western democratic order and seeks to polarize societies along religious lines. Now, European states should put aside misgivings about the abrasiveness of this presidency and take advantage of Washington’s attention on the issue.

European leaders should instruct security agencies to develop an intelligence picture of its domestic Muslim Brotherhood milieu. In some cases, action may stop there, and European states will need to learn to live with Islamists, even ones who reject many aspects of European democracy. In other cases, intelligence should be used to close down sham charities that funnel support for groups such as Hamas. European states must then share intelligence with one another and with the United States to ensure robust action against individuals who back Hamas and other violent actors.

The intelligence should also help governments develop an approach to tackling hostile ideological actors that operate just below the terrorism threshold. That approach would include attempts to undermine radicalizing narratives and disrupting recruitment activities.

The Muslim Brotherhood–Hamas Nexus

The Muslim Brotherhood has been active in Europe since the 1960s, arriving via students setting up Islamic societies and associations in universities.

It is a transnational and at times loose network where local branches tailor their behavior depending on the permissiveness of the environment in which they operate. Within this network, a cadre of local activists tied to each other through various NGOs, media outlets, and civil society groups tend to set the strategic direction.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not a coherent, single actor. In Europe, it is more focused on proselytization. In the Middle East, the Palestinian branch of the group, Hamas, is a terrorist organization, and other branches have used violence on their own against Israel, as discussed below. For example, Article Two of the 1988 Hamas Covenant outlines that it is a “wing” of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine (this reference to the group was dropped from Hamas’s “Document of General Principles and Policies” from 2017, but practical and operational assistance endures). The packages that the United States has crafted in providing legal justification for designation have also shown that the Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with violence is far more complex than sometimes assumed.

Yet even allowing for local variations, a strand running through Muslim Brotherhood activism is seeking to shape Muslim opinion, weaken ties to the nation state, and harden religious identity in its spheres of influence. It will consistently present Islamic law as preferable to man-made laws.

Past U.S. Enforcement Efforts

The U.S. government has historically ignored the various Muslim Brotherhood branches and entities from a counterterrorism perspective, focusing only on Hamas, which is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. For Europe, much of the U.S. focus is on stopping Hamas’s fundraising. For example, in May 2003, the Treasury Department designated the Al-Aqsa Foundation, which had branches across Europe, for funneling “money collected for charitable purposes to Hamas terrorists.” The use of charitable fronts for Hamas fundraising is a well-worn tactic, and the Treasury Department has designated entities in the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, and Austria.

As far back as the George W. Bush administration, there was exasperation around the willingness of European partners to support the U.S. government’s efforts. Many European governments regarded the U.S. approach as heavy handed. This was an attitude no doubt complemented by the belief that Hamas was a complex organization with multiple components and only those providing assistance to the military wing should be sanctioned. While this compartmentalization approach broke down at EU level in 2003—albeit reluctantly with certain partners—it took until November 2021 for the UK government to proscribe Hamas in its entirety and accept that the notion of a firewall between the military and political wings was an artificial distinction.

The U.S. government—under Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump—has taken enforcement action against a range of European entities connected to Hamas following the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, usually via the Treasury Department’s Office for Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

However, in a break with previous U.S. policy, the Trump administration issued Executive Order 14362 in November 2025, which began the process of designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the Trump Administration

The administration’s designation puts it at odds with European states’ traditional approach to the Muslim Brotherhood. In general, Western democracies have tolerated the Muslim Brotherhood, not banned it.

Europe and the United States have at different times both considered the Muslim Brotherhood a useful bulwark against the violent jihadism of al Qaeda. For example, in 2005, the London Metropolitan Police used the Muslim Brotherhood to wrest back control of Finsbury Park Mosque from jihadi cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri—now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for terrorism offences—and his followers. And during the Obama administration, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified that the Muslim Brotherhood “has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam” and that “there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.”

That position has since shifted in both the United States and Europe, and for good reason. The Muslim Brotherhood is not as radical as al Qaeda, but it is still a hardline Islamist organization and partnering with it sent a disastrous signal to actual Muslim moderates who feared the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence at local level and came to resent the patronage it was given from the state.

This perspective has slowly come to be more widely accepted across Europe. For example, the United Kingdom ordered a prime ministerial review in 2014 that explained the Muslim Brotherhood “promoted a radical, transformative politics” and that its “ideology and tactics . . . are contrary to our values and . . . our national security.” Similarly, European intelligence agencies have a long track record of analyzing and presenting to policymakers the risk posed by the group. This ultimately helped inform a focus by some on cutting financial ties with charities on the grounds of their connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yet there has not been an accompanying push for proscription, primarily because the Muslim Brotherhood’s European activism is beneath the terrorism threshold and there was a sense that a crackdown could be counterproductive, providing the group with further grievances from which to recruit—and perhaps even radicalizing some members into terrorism. These concerns, arguably too influenced by the experience of Egyptian crackdowns with insufficient emphasis on European legal safeguards, reinforced the conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood did not behave like a traditional terrorist group.

Instead, it was the regional actors who perceived the Muslim Brotherhood as both a local and imminent threat—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt—who responded to the challenge with banning orders.

In the United States, the notion that the Muslim Brotherhood may be targeted was in the ether from the earliest days of the Trump administration. In February 2017, New York Times reporting suggested a politically driven desire to designate within the White House, one that was being resisted by career officials on the National Security Council and in the State Department. It took until April 2019 for the White House to announce it would undertake such a move, following a visit from President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt. However, it was ultimately not implemented by the end of the first Trump term and was not a policy revived by President Biden.

The second Trump administration, however, revisited the question. Following the November 2025 executive order, the Treasury Department announced the designation of Muslim Brotherhood branches in Egypt and Jordan in January 2026; and the State Department announced Lebanon the same day, with Sudan to follow in March 2026.

There are good reasons that different arms of the U.S. government took the lead in these designations. The Treasury Department is the designating authority for those branches assessed to provide material support to terrorism (for example, financing terror or providing instruction). In scope was the Egyptian mothership and Jordanian branch. The Egyptian Brotherhood, for example, helped facilitate the travel of foreign fighters into Gaza for Hamas’s benefit in 2024, while the Jordanian Brotherhood helped manufacture weapons, fundraise, and recruit for Hamas.

The State Department, however, led on those Muslim Brotherhood branches assessed to be direct perpetrators of violence. For example, the Sudanese Brotherhood is said to use “unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology” and to “have conducted mass executions of civilians.” The Lebanese branch fired rockets into northern Israel after the October 7 attack.

Then, in May 2026, the White House’s Counterterrorism Strategy spelled out clearly how this administration views the threat posed by the group. It stated that “all modern Jihadi groups, from al Qaeda to ISIS to Hamas, can trace their roots back to . . . the Muslim Brotherhood,” which it labelled “the root of all modern Islamist terrorism.” It outlined its intent to go beyond the designations already announced and “crush the organization everywhere it operates.” Evidently, then, there was a desire from the White House to go beyond the steps already taken.

It was no great surprise that sanctions against the UK-based al-Abiary followed and were framed to highlight his membership of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Abiary was assessed by the United States to be the secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood General Secretariat. He also had ties to Hamas, being connected to fundraising for two Turkish entities previously designated by the United States for their ties to the terrorist group.

This last point is particularly relevant. While the United States is keen to pursue the Muslim Brotherhood, the interconnectedness of the Muslim Brotherhood–Hamas network in Europe means the two groups will inevitably feed into each other. It is an easier sell for the United States to focus on Hamas-linked individuals, as that is a group recognized as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. However, when it comes to understanding the European network, drawing a clear line between European Muslim Brotherhood entities and those linked to Hamas is too binary an approach. Instead, Hamas-linked figures behave and are probably treated internally as Muslim Brothers of Palestinian origin.

Take Zaher Birawi. In January 2026, Zaher Birawi was sanctioned due to his ties to Hamas via the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA), an organization formed in Turkey in February 2017. The Treasury Department described the PCPA as “a front organization for Hamas” which “operates in accordance with Hamas directives and was established and managed by operatives from Hamas’s Bureau of International Relations.”

Birawi is based in the United Kingdom and has close connections to just under a dozen Palestinian-centric charities and companies in the country (which is where he is based). Some of these entities have known ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Birawi may have been designated for his ties to Hamas, but because the European network is intertwined, the knock-on effect also impacts the Muslim Brotherhood.

In addition to U.S. attention to Europe-based Muslim Brotherhood figures, the Trump administration has also made it clear it expects its European allies to take action against the group (albeit with an acceptance that Europeans are unlikely to be willing to go as far as the United States in designating branches of the Muslim Brotherhood). Some nations will inevitably be more comfortable helping than others. French officials, for example, openly talk about the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood and have crafted policies to respond to it. The United Kingdom is far more reticent to see this as a pressing issue.

Conclusion

The particular and at times direct style of this presidency can occasionally shock European governments and their citizens. However, the continent would ideally take advantage of Washington’s focus on this topic to sharpen its own policy thinking. At present, the United States is forcing the conversation onto the agenda in European capitals. Not only should it not take American pressure for that to be necessary, but alarmingly, the United States is sometimes finding that some governments have very little to say in response.

European governments should take up the challenge, collecting and then disseminating actionable intelligence to assist Washington in developing sanctions packages for individuals and entities connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. That does not mean bowing to every demand from Washington but recognizing there is currently a unique level of political interest from the White House in tackling the European Muslim Brotherhood network and those charities and individuals who have previously slipped through the cracks in European terrorism laws.

There is no sure way of knowing whether a more repressive approach will push those with Islamist views but no intent to attack the West into a more militant stance. Such fears were raised when the UK government proscribed the Caliphate revivalists of Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2024, also often described as hardline but ultimately non-violent, but thus far those fears appear unfounded.

Clearly, it is a fine balance to strike. While tackling the Muslim Brotherhood may sometimes require designations and sanctions, democracies must also be robust enough to accept the existence of a politicized form of Islam without immediately banning such groups and sanctioning or jailing its adherents.

Therefore, European governments should develop an approach to tackling hostile ideological actors that operate just below the terrorism threshold. This approach would involve undermining radicalizing narratives, disrupting recruitment activities (for example, by not allowing extremists to host events at government-owned venues), and removing charitable status from sham nonprofits. A comprehensive intelligence assessment of the nature and scale of the Muslim Brotherhood’s network would clearly be required to underpin this work and ensure resources are sensibly used.

European governments and the United States may not always align on the fine print. However, a broad need to actively challenge the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence is something that should form a sustainable point of agreement between Washington and relevant capitals in Europe.

Robin Simcox is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.