The DFLP is best known for a 1974 terrorist attack on Israeli schoolchildren in the northern town of Ma’alot.
Ambassador Michael Sheehan, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, said officials base their decision on “whether an organization is involved in terrorist activity over the past two years,” including the planning of attacks and fund-raising.
Although the Israeli government agreed with the U.S. move, some Israelis who were victims of attacks for which the DFLP claimed responsibility has criticized the decision.
Baruch Ben-Yaakov, originally John Wicks from Nesconset, N.Y. who now lives in Kiryat Arba, was attacked by an ax-wielding DFLP member on Oct. 16, 1993 in Hebron.
“If the DFLP has really given up being a terrorist organization, why hasn’t it surrendered the terrorist who tried to murder me?” he said in a letter to President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.