The former Palestinian prime minister whose Change and Reform list received the highest number of votes in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections was designated Jan. 31 as a “terrorist” by the United States. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury added Ismail Haniyeh to the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

Haniyeh was sworn in as prime minister on March 29, 2006, and was replaced by Salam Fayyad on June 25, 2007.

Haniyeh, born in 1962 in the Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, was elected in May 2017 as the head of Hamas. Outside of Israel, the United States is the first country to pin the terrorism label on the political head of the Palestinian Islamic movement.

Nathan Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, told Al-Monitor that the Treasury’s designation comes as part of an interagency process and was announced by the State Department, which is a participant in that process. “But the formal step is inclusion in the OFAC of the US Department of the Treasury. So there is nothing new or unusual about the Treasury's role here,” he said. Interagency policy allows for all US government agencies to coordinate their positions before a decision is made public.