US media reported last month that the US designated Hamas military commander Abu Anas al-Ghandour as a global terrorist. According to the AP report:
April 6, 2017 Washington (AP) — The United States is hitting a Hamas military commander with terrorism sanctions.
The State Department says it’s designating Abu Anas al-Ghandour as a global terrorist. The designation freezes any assets in the U.S. and bars Americans from doing business with him.
Hamas is the Islamic militant group that rules the Gaza Strip. The U.S. considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization.
Ghandour leads a Hamas brigade in northern Gaza and spent years in Israeli prison decades ago. The U.S. says he was involved in an attack on an Israeli military outpost on the Israel-Gaza border that killed two Israeli soldiers. The U.S. says that attack led to the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. The soldier was released in a 2011 prisoner swap.”
Although Hamas has lately claimed that it no longer has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, there are good reasons to be skeptical. If nothing else, the recent moves appear to concern only the Egyptian organization and not the wider Global Muslim Brotherhood which is near universal in its support of Hamas.
For more on Hamas, go here.