Difference between revisions of "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine"
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== Terrorist attacks == | == Terrorist attacks == | ||
| + | His first known attack, is hijacking of El Al Flight 426 from Rome to Lod airport in Israel on 23 July 1968 | ||
| + | <ref>[Arab nationalist planned hijackings - Los Angeles Times] By Kim Murphy, Jan. 27, 2008. ''He studied medicine at the American University of Beirut, founding a series of radical student organizations that called for unifying the Arabs’ military might to annihilate Israel. | ||
| + | After Israeli forces crushed an Arab assault and moved into the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East War, Habash formed the PFLP to continue operations against Israelis. It became the second-largest faction within the PLO, after Arafat’s Fatah organization. | ||
| + | In one of its first operations, an Israeli El Al airliner was hijacked to Algiers in July 1968, forcing the Israelis to free 16 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of the plane and its passengers.''</ref>. | ||
On July 22, 1968, the PFLP hijacked its first plane, an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv<ref>[https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/pflp-dflp-pflp-gc-palestinian-leftists PFLP, DFLP, PFLP-GC, Palestinian leftists. Last updated October 31, 2005] What terrorist activities has the PFLP undertaken? In its early years, the PFLP conducted hundreds of terrorist attacks. It is best known for pioneering the technique of international airplane hijackings in the late 1960s and 1970s—with consequences that rattled the Middle East: | On July 22, 1968, the PFLP hijacked its first plane, an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv<ref>[https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/pflp-dflp-pflp-gc-palestinian-leftists PFLP, DFLP, PFLP-GC, Palestinian leftists. Last updated October 31, 2005] What terrorist activities has the PFLP undertaken? In its early years, the PFLP conducted hundreds of terrorist attacks. It is best known for pioneering the technique of international airplane hijackings in the late 1960s and 1970s—with consequences that rattled the Middle East: | ||
-On July 22, 1968, the PFLP hijacked its first plane, an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. | -On July 22, 1968, the PFLP hijacked its first plane, an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. | ||
Revision as of 20:25, August 2, 2020
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization and one of the main groups of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.[1] On its website the organization openly celebrates Hezbollah and calls for Gaza Strip to be turned into an Israeli "graveyard." It also declares that it won't respect any PLO agreements with Israel.[2]
History
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was established in 1967 by George Habash. It was originally backed by Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser. The PFLP perpetrated hijackings of airplanes and other terrorist attacks on civilians from its beginnings.[3] Throughout its history some factions splitted from the organization such as the PFLP-General Command. Habash retired from his post and was succeeded by Abū ʿAlī Muṣṭafā, who was killed by Israeli forces in 2001.[4]
In February 2010 a joint meeting with members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad was held in the offices of the PFLP in order to fight Israel as a unified force.[1]
Its founder, George Habash, already as student, was founding a series of radical student organizations that called for unifying the Arabs’ military might to annihilate Israel [5].
In a July 1970 interview with LIFE magazine, [6] meeting at night in the suburbs of Amman, in a building attached to a refugee camp, Habash "explained"[7] his targeting:
Let me explain: the attacks of the Popular Front are based on quality, not quantity. We believe that to kill a Jew far from the battleground has more of an effect than killing 100 of them in battle; it attracts more attention. And when we set fire to a store in London, those few flames are worth the burning down of two kibbutzim...
Aftet it was published. There was an attempt to deny Habash's words by the propaganda wing from PFLP the time. But journalist Oriana F. replied: ... interview with Dr. Habash was recorded on such a machine. The tape is at his disposal to refresh his memory if he has forgotten, or wants to forget. I would like to believe that Dr. Habash is not informed about this letter of his associates or he would have prevented them from writing so many useless idiocies...[8]
Terrorist attacks
His first known attack, is hijacking of El Al Flight 426 from Rome to Lod airport in Israel on 23 July 1968 [9]. On July 22, 1968, the PFLP hijacked its first plane, an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv[10].
In 1976, the PFLP along with the German terrorist Revolutionary Cells hijacked an Air France flight to Entebbe, Uganda, where they singled out the Jewish passengers in a plot to murder them.[11]
On February 16, 2002 it perpetrated a suicide bombing attack in a village in the West Bank which killed three Israeli civilians and wounded 25 more. On December 25, 2003 three Israeli civilians were murdered because of a suicide attack at a bus station in Tel Aviv.[3]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Kaufman, Joe (February 23, 2010). THE “PEACE PARTNERS” WHO NEVER WERE. FrontpageMag. Retrieved September 17, 2018.
- ↑ Americans Against Hate
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Palestinian Terror Groups: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved September 17, 2018.
- ↑ Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved September 17, 2018.
- ↑ [Arab nationalist planned hijackings - Los Angeles Times] By Kim Murphy, Jan. 27, 2008. He studied medicine at the American University of Beirut, founding a series of radical student organizations that called for unifying the Arabs’ military might to annihilate Israel.
- ↑ LIFE Jun 12, 1970, p.32
- ↑ LIFE Jun 12, 1970, p.33
- ↑ LIFE - Jul 17, 1970, p.19Life - Volume 69, Issues 1-5, p.98 Oriana Fallaci replies: "The PFLP's so-called Department of Information (I say 'so-called' because it never showed up during my stay with the fedayeen) evidently ignores the existence of a machine known as a tape recorder. My interview with Dr. Habash was recorded on such a machine. The tape is at his disposal to refresh his memory if he has forgotten, or wants to forget. I would like to believe that Dr. Habash is not informed about this letter of his associates or he would have prevented them from writing so many useless idiocies and senseless insults. Dr. Habash knows .very well that what I wrote was said by him into a microphone. The word "terrorism" might not have been used often by me. This was out of politeness which I now regret. But J did use the word, and I even commented that when we Europeans were fighting for our freedom we did not kill children or civilians. Dr. Habash did not react in anger; he explained his theory. "I obviously edit my interviews. But I did not need to edit much in this one because it was good as it was. It opens as it opened. It ends as it ended and it reports faithfully, all that Habash said in a 90 minute interview in English. The words on the tape are clear, the sound excellent. Mistakes are impossible, except for the pronunciation of the year 1957, which I might have understood as 1967, due to his slight lips. The only thing that the tape did not record is Dr. Habash's tears and his mouth's trembling , a human reaction that helped me to like him a lot. In this I might have been wrong. "The PFLP's so-called Department of Information also insinuates that I am a fascist. To such vulgarity I will only answer that when Dr. Habash was doing nothing against fascism, and his people were getting along very well with the Nazis, I was a little girl with pigtails fighting fascism in the resistance in Italy. I recall that there were no Palestinian journalists to interview us or to sympathize with us at the risk of their lives."
- ↑ [Arab nationalist planned hijackings - Los Angeles Times] By Kim Murphy, Jan. 27, 2008. He studied medicine at the American University of Beirut, founding a series of radical student organizations that called for unifying the Arabs’ military might to annihilate Israel. After Israeli forces crushed an Arab assault and moved into the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East War, Habash formed the PFLP to continue operations against Israelis. It became the second-largest faction within the PLO, after Arafat’s Fatah organization. In one of its first operations, an Israeli El Al airliner was hijacked to Algiers in July 1968, forcing the Israelis to free 16 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of the plane and its passengers.
- ↑ PFLP, DFLP, PFLP-GC, Palestinian leftists. Last updated October 31, 2005 What terrorist activities has the PFLP undertaken? In its early years, the PFLP conducted hundreds of terrorist attacks. It is best known for pioneering the technique of international airplane hijackings in the late 1960s and 1970s—with consequences that rattled the Middle East: -On July 22, 1968, the PFLP hijacked its first plane, an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. -In September 1970, the PFLP hijacked three passenger planes and took them to airfields in Jordan, where the PLO was then based; after the planes were emptied, the hijackers blew them up. In response, King Hussein of Jordan decided that Palestinian radicals had gone too far and drove the PLO out of his kingdom. -In 1972, PFLP and Japanese Red Army gunmen murdered two dozen passengers at Israel’s international airport in Lod. -In 1976, breaking a PLO agreement to end terrorism outside Israeli-held territory, PFLP members joined with West German radical leftists from the Baader-Meinhof Gang to hijack an Air France flight bound for Tel Aviv and landed the plane in Entebbe, Uganda. In a now-famous raid, Israeli commandos stormed the plane on the Entebbe tarmac and freed the hostages. -During the Platestinian intifada, PFLP gunmen shot dead Ze’evi, Israel’s rightist tourism minister, in a Jerusalem hotel—the first assassination of an Israeli minister. The group has also claimed responsibility for several recent car bombings and shootings in Israel and the West Bank. -In April 2002, Israeli officials foiled a PFLP attempt to blow up a Tel Aviv skyscraper with a car bomb—which could have caused massive casualties and would have marked a dramatic escalation in Palestinian terrorism. -The group was responsible for a suicide bombing Christmas Day 2003, in which four people were killed and more than twenty were wounded. -The PFLP and its current leader, Ahmed Jibril, were mentioned in the 2005 United Nations report into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, for allegedly assisting senior Lebanese security officials who were implicated in the 2004 car bombing that killed Hariri.
- ↑ Stephen E. Atkins, Encyclopedia of modern worldwide extremists and extremist groups (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004) ISBN 0313324859, p. 277
