US drops Judea, Samaria residents from sanctions list

Fifty-eight individuals and organizations were deleted from the list, including one Palestinian terrorist organization, the ‘Lion’s Den’ from Nablus in Samaria.

By JNS

U.S. President Donald Trump’s revocation of sanctions implemented against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria by the Biden administration came into effect on Friday, with the West Bank-Related Sanctions program having been removed from the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) website.

According to the OAFC, all persons designated for financial sanctions under former President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14115 of Feb. 1, 2024, were removed from the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List).

“All property and interests in property blocked under E.O. 14115 are unblocked,” the OAFC confirmed on Friday.

Fifty-eight individuals and organizations were deleted from the list, including one Palestinian terrorist organization, the “Lion’s Den” from Nablus in Samaria.

“The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal and radical practices within every agency and office of the federal government,” Trump said on Monday, after revoking a host of what he called “harmful” executive orders and actions of the former administration.

In addition to revoking the order regarding residents of Judea and Samaria, Trump also canceled Executive Order 14022 from April 1, 2021, in which Biden ended the “national emergency” with respect to the International Criminal Court.

The court, which is based in The Hague and is independent of the United Nations, has issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

By revoking Biden’s executive order, Trump returned Executive Order 13928 from June 11, 2020, which referred to the court’s “illegitimate assertions of jurisdiction over personnel of the United States and certain of its allies” and sanctioned those connected to the court who asserted such jurisdiction.

After Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election, leaders and activists across the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria were nearly unanimous in their praises for the Republican candidate.

Attorney Marc Zell, a resident of Tekoa in Gush Etzion in Judea who serves as chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel, told JNS, “In the previous Trump administration, the secretary of state [Mike Pompeo] stated unequivocally that Jewish presence, settlement and development in Judea and Samaria is both legal and appropriate.

“The Harris-Biden-Obama administration rescinded this policy and reverted to the Obama-Biden administration policy, which treated Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria as an obstacle to peace and ‘illegitimate.’ This will likely change dramatically during the coming Trump administration—for the better,” Zell said.