ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday welcomed US President Donald Trump’s decision to move toward designating branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations over their alleged ties to Hamas and connection to the October 7 attack on Israel.

On Monday, Trump signed an executive order for US officials to start the process of designating “certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood” as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, the White House said in a statement. 

Washington accused the Muslim Brotherhood of having alleged links to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and moved to ban chapters in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt over their purported support for militant activities.

“Such activities threaten the security of American civilians in the Levant and other parts of the Middle East, as well as the safety and stability of our regional partners,” it added.

Netanyahu, welcoming the move, noted, “For years, they have sown chaos, promoted extremism, and threatened governments across the Middle East, which is why many nations in our region already banned them,” he said in a post on his X. 

The order requires the Secretaries of State and Treasury, in coordination with the attorney general and intelligence chief, to submit a report within 30 days on whether Muslim Brotherhood chapters in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, or elsewhere should be designated as foreign terrorist organizations, the White House said.

Some countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have already designated the group as a terrorist organization, with Jordan most recently banning it in April.

The pan-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928, later spreading across the Middle East and eventually developing into a transnational network.

The movement was founded by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, pursuing governance based on Islamic principles and aiming to end Western colonial influence.

In Egypt, the group has been banned since 2013, following the military-led ouster of then-President Mohamed Morsi, who was the Brotherhood's candidate of choice. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who sided against Morsi in the coup, now leads the country and maintains a key alliance with Washington.

In October, an agreement was brokered by Trump, which came after two years of sustained conflict in the region. According to Gaza's health ministry, the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip has resulted in the deaths of over 70,000 people, the majority of whom are civilians.

On Saturday, in a wave of Israeli air raids across the Gaza Strip, at least 21 people were killed and many others injured, according to Gaza’s civil defense service, as Hamas and Israel once again accused each other of breaking a tenuous ceasefire.

The latest strikes made Saturday one of the bloodiest days since a US-mediated truce between Israel and Hamas took hold on October 10.