A bipartisan group of two U.S. senators and six members of the House reintroduced legislation on Tuesday to sanction the Popular Resistance Committees as a specially designated global terrorist organization.
“It is past time that the PRC, whose ranks include former operatives from Hamas and PIJ, join their ranks on the United States’ list of designated terrorist groups,” the members of Congress stated jointly, when they reintroduced the Accountability for Terrorist Perpetrators of Oct. 7 Act.
The members are Sens. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), David Kustoff (R-Tenn.), Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Sarah McBride (D-Del.).
The designation for which the legislation calls would mean that anyone who intentionally supported the Popular Resistance Committees would be punishable by up to 20 years in prison, civil finds and property forfeitures. It would also subject the group and its members to asset-blocking sanctions in any financial institution connected to the U.S. financial system, as well as to visa sanctions.
Founded in 2000 during the Second Intifada, the group, which is not as well known as Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, is the third-largest terror group operating in Gaza. It is responsible for terror attacks against Americans and Israelis, including a 2003 attack on a U.S. diplomatic convoy, which killed three American security guards and injured a diplomat.
Terrorists from the group also carried out a brutal massacre, killing the pregnant Israeli woman Tali Hatuel and her four daughters.
The reintroduced bill, a companion to Senate legislation introduced by Ricketts and Schiff, sailed through the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the last Congress, but never advanced to a full vote.
The PRC boasted of its responsibility for and participation in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel, including murder and hostage taking.
“Every day that we fail to sanction the terrorist Popular Resistance Committees—which have murdered Americans and Israelis for decades, and participated in the barbaric Oct. 7 massacre including by taking hostages—is another day that we fail to secure justice for their victims,” Sherman wrote.
“I’m proud to reintroduce my legislation to finally hold these monsters accountable for the terror they have wreaked on innocents in the region,” he said.
“The terrorists responsible for the barbaric Oct. 7 attack on Israel must be held accountable for their abhorrent actions against innocent men, women and children,” wrote Kustoff, one of three Jewish House Republicans. “Enough is enough.”
Schiff wrote that “any organization engaging in this level of violence should be sanctioned under U.S. law and officially designated as a terrorist group.”