The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) is a Marxist-Leninist and Palestinian nationalist terrorist group, founded in 1969 by Nayef Hawatmeh. Its armed wing is the National Resistance Brigades.
History[]
The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine was founded in 1969 by Nayef Hawatmeh as a Marxist-Leninist and Palestinian nationalist group. It was a member organization of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with PLO leader Nayef Hawatmeh being the DFLP's founder and long-lasting leader. The DFLP's armed wing, the National Resistance Brigades, carried out the Ma'alot massacre of 1974, killing 25 schoolchildren and teachers. In the early 1980s, the DFLP was seen as the most pro-Soviet Union and pro-People's Republic of China Palestinian organization, and in 1993 they resisted the Oslo Accords. In 1986, their Secretary-General Khaled Ahmed Nazal was assassinated in Athens, Greece by the Mossad intelligence agency of Israel.
At the beginning of the Second Intifada they carried out a number of shooting attacks against Israeli targets, but its military capabilities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were limited. On 11 September 2001 an anonymous person claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, which killed 2,973 people, on behalf of the DFLP, but this was later proven as false, as Hawatmeh strongly criticized the attacks, and the DFLP were not nearly powerful or audacious enough to carry out an attack of that scale.
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