Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

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The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a secular Marxist-Leninist Palestinian terrorist organization, founded in December 1967, that pioneered civilian airplane hijacking as an instrument of political terror and remains, six decades later, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization in the United States, the European Union, Canada, and Israel. It is the second-largest faction inside the Palestine Liberation Organization, after Fatah, and it has never renounced armed struggle or recognized Israel’s right to exist. Its founders were doctors and intellectuals, not clerics; that secular, hard-left pedigree is the reason Western press coverage has often treated it as a lesser story than Islamist groups, even though its body count includes some of the most infamous mass-hostage operations of the twentieth century.

Who founded it, and why

The PFLP was formed on 11 December 1967 by George Habash, a Greek Orthodox Christian physician, out of a merger of his Arab Nationalist Movement with two smaller militant cells. Habash was born in Lydda in 1926; his family fled the town during the fighting of the 1948 war, and he spent the rest of his life arguing that Arab nationalism, not religion, would recover Palestine. The group’s founding came five months after the catastrophic Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, which Habash and his circle read as proof that conventional Arab armies could never beat Israel and that only revolutionary guerrilla war, modeled on Marxist national-liberation movements in Vietnam, Algeria, and Cuba, could. The PFLP framed the conflict not as a religious struggle but as an anti-imperialist one, with Israel cast as an outpost of Western colonialism; it drew arms, training, and funding from the Soviet Union, Syria, and for a time China, and it kept close ties to European far-left terror cells through the 1970s and 1980s.

The hijacking era

The PFLP’s signature innovation was turning commercial aviation into a stage for political theater and mass hostage-taking, a tactic the world had not seen at this scale before 1968:

23 July 1968: the PFLP hijacked El Al Flight 426 from Rome to Tel Aviv and diverted it to Algiers, the first hijacking of an Israeli airliner and the operation that opened the modern era of political skyjacking.
August–September 1970: in what became known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings, the PFLP seized four Western airliners simultaneously and forced three of them down at a desert airstrip in Jordan, blowing up the empty planes on camera after evacuating hostages. The crisis humiliated King Hussein and triggered Black September, the Jordanian army’s expulsion of Yasser Arafat’s PLO from Jordan into Lebanon.
30 May 1972: working with recruits from the Japanese Red Army, the PFLP carried out the Lod Airport massacre, machine-gunning and grenading the arrivals hall of Israel’s international airport; 26 people were killed and roughly 80 wounded, most of them civilian travelers, many of them Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims.
27 June 1976: the PFLP, together with two German far-left militants, hijacked Air France Flight 139 to Entebbe, Uganda, and separated Jewish and Israeli passengers from the rest for continued captivity, a selection that echoed the Holocaust closely enough that it shocked even sympathetic European opinion. Israeli commandos freed the hostages in a raid a week later; only one Israeli soldier, Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed in the rescue.

Leila Khaled, who took part in the 1969 hijacking of TWA Flight 840 and the failed 1970 hijacking of an El Al flight, became the group’s most recognizable face and remains, decades later, a celebrated speaker on Western university campuses, a fact the PFLP entry on the university lecture circuit documents in detail.

The Ze’evi assassination and the current leadership

Habash led the PFLP until 2000 and died in 2008; his successor, Abu Ali Mustafa, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Ramallah on 27 August 2001. In retaliation, PFLP gunmen assassinated Israel’s tourism minister, Rehavam Ze’evi, in a Jerusalem hotel on 17 October 2001, the first killing of a sitting Israeli cabinet minister by a terrorist group. The operation was ordered by Ahmad Sa’adat, who took over as the PFLP’s secretary-general. The Palestinian Authority held Sa’adat under nominal arrest in Jericho until Israeli forces stormed the prison in March 2006 to seize him after Israel judged the PA’s custody a fiction; an Israeli military court convicted him in 2008 and sentenced him to 30 years, which he is still serving. He remains the PFLP’s formal leader from an Israeli prison cell, a detail that on its own refutes any claim that the organization has moved past armed struggle.

The present: October 7 and the fundraising network

The PFLP is small next to Hamas, but it did not sit out the October 7 attacks: its armed wing, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, participated alongside Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the 2023 assault and has continued rocket fire and attacks in the years since. In August 2019 a PFLP cell planted the bomb that killed 17-year-old Rina Shnerb near a spring in the West Bank. Outside the territories, the PFLP sustains itself through an international fundraising network; in October 2024 the United States and Canada jointly sanctioned Samidoun, a self-described Palestinian prisoner solidarity group, and its co-founder Khaled Barakat, identifying Samidoun as a front that channels donations from Europe and North America to the PFLP, which the State Department first designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in October 1997 and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in October 2001.

The distinctions worth making, and what they don’t change

Two objections are worth taking seriously. The PFLP is genuinely distinct from the PFLP-General Command, a 1968 splinter led by Ahmad Jibril that operated separately, took Syrian rather than Soviet patronage, and carried out its own attacks, including a 1974 school-bus massacre in Ma’alot; conflating the two groups, which share a name and little else, is a common and avoidable error. And the PFLP is not a fringe outlier inside Palestinian politics: it has held a formal seat on the PLO Executive Committee for most of its existence, its rejection of the Oslo Accords as a sellout was shared at the time by a real constituency of Palestinians, and it calls itself national “resistance” rather than terrorism, a framing choice, not a factual dispute, examined at the words-and-distinctions entry on resistance. Neither point changes the record: a group that machine-gunned an airport arrivals hall, separated Jewish hostages at Entebbe, and assassinated a sitting minister is a terrorist organization by any definition that predates the terrorism itself.

Palestine Liberation Organization · Fatah · Leila Khaled · October 7 attacks · Who attacked first in the Six-Day War · Who attacked first, every war