<\/p>\n\n\n\n
THE HISTORICAL LINK<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf The PFLP trained ETA. In 1980, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) instructed a dozen ETA members in a training camp in Yemen for 60 days. The commandos learned how to handle automatic weapons and mortars. The contact was arranged by Josu Ternera \u2014 the most wanted ETA terrorist in the history of Spain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf A documented and verified collaboration. The source: the doctoral thesis of researcher Florencio Dom\u00ednguez (UPV-EHU), \u201cETA: Organizational Strategy and Actions 1978-1992\u201d. Four of the ETA members who participated \u2014 Jos\u00e9 Manuel Arzalluz Eguiguren, Juan Ignacio Urrutibeascoa, Jos\u00e9 Antonio Aguirrebarrena and Juan Carlos Yurrebaso Atutxa \u2014 were arrested in Amsterdam by Dutch police upon their return from Yemen. The rest joined commands such as Araba, Goierri and Donosti \u2014 some of the bloodiest in ETA\u2019s history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf The PFLP: a recognized terrorist organization. It is classified as a terrorist organization by the European Union, the United States and Canada. Its record includes plane hijackings, grenade attacks on Israeli embassies, and incidents on Spanish soil: the assault on the Egyptian embassy in Madrid (1975) and the murder of a PFLP correspondent in Madrid (1982).<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf In 2024, the PFLP marched in Madrid. The same group took part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Madrid authorized by the Government Delegation. Youth Minister Sira Rego marched behind their banners. Israel formally requested that the Government take action. The Government did not respond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf The link is not only historical: Samidoun visited the PFLP in 2021. In July 2021, a Samidoun delegation \u2014 the network behind the Sumud flotilla \u2014 traveled to Lebanon, visited the PFLP offices and paid tribute to its terrorists. Samidoun is sanctioned as a terrorist organization by the US and Canada, and was outlawed in Germany in 2023. The ETA-PFLP connection is not political archaeology: it is a living network that in 2026 organized 22 boats to Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Saif Abu Keshek: Spanish citizen sanctioned by the US Treasury. The main coordinator of the flotilla holds a Spanish passport and was sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury (OFAC) on May 19, 2026 as a member of the General Secretariat of the PCPA \u2014 an organization designated as terrorist by the Treasury for financing Hamas and by Israel since 2021. Documents captured from Hamas in Gaza identify him as operative number 25 of the PCPA in Spain. He is the link that unites the flotilla, the PFLP and the network that trained ETA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n THE SAME STRUCTURE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf The same monitors, with ETA convictions. In the 2026 flotilla, Jos\u00e9 Javier Oses participated; he was convicted in France to eight years in prison for belonging to ETA \u2014 and was one of the four arrested at Loiu airport upon return. In the 2025 flotilla, Itziar Moreno participated; she was sentenced to 15 years in prison for shooting and wounding a French gendarme, also for links to ETA, and was welcomed at Loiu with cheers and Palestinian flags. These are not \u201clinks with the Basque independence movement\u201d: these are final convictions for terrorism, in two consecutive editions of the same flotilla. (Source: EFE, May 26, 2026.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf At the service of victimhood. The manual is literal. In the \u201cdetainees\u2019 manual\u201d seized in the police operation against the Araba commando (1998) and confirmed in the judicial summary of Gestoras Pro Amnist\u00eda, ETA ordered its militants to systematically denounce torture after any arrest \u2014 regardless of whether it had occurred. The instruction was explicit: always denounce, against all possible agents, and \u201cuse your imagination\u201d. Gestoras Pro Amnist\u00eda was the visible arm of that system: it activated the complaint, amplified it and delivered it to friendly media. The organizers of the Sumud flotilla have followed this same protocol with millimeter precision: before setting sail they already had the narrative of \u201cbrutality\u201d and \u201cpiracy\u201d prepared; as soon as Israel intercepted the boats, friendly channels spread it as proven fact. The incident is manufactured to be exploited. The narrative precedes the fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf The same street pressure. The day after the incidents at Loiu (May 23, 2026), a demonstration was called in Bilbao under the slogan: \u201cErtzaintza and Basque Government complicit with Israel. Destroy Zionism, free Palestine.\u201d This is not an isolated case: in the days prior, a mob tried to storm the Arriaga Theater in Bilbao to boycott the performance of the Israeli company Hofesh Shechter. The pattern \u2014 Israeli interception or presence, network alert, immediate street pressure \u2014 exactly reproduces the mobilization structure that the ETA environment activated with every arrest of its militants. The same mechanism, the same networks, four decades later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf The same dependence on totalitarian regimes. ETA was financed and trained with the support of Libya, Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua and the USSR \u2014 regimes that provided training camps, weapons and diplomatic cover. Hamas depends on Iran, which according to the US Department of the Treasury transfers between 100 and 200 million dollars annually, and on Qatar, which hosts its political leadership. The Sumud flotilla raised more than 4 million euros in crowdfunding campaigns coordinated from Spain, through organizations such as the Intersindical Alternativa de Catalunya (IAC), of which Abu Keshek was a member of the board of directors. In both cases \u2014 ETA and Hamas \u2014 without external sponsorship, terrorism would not have sustained operational capacity. The network does not disappear with the organization: it reconfigures itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n THE POLITICAL CONNIVANCE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf The Security Counselor defends the activists against his own police. Bingen Zupiria, Basque Security Counselor, appeared before the Basque Parliament to lament the incidents at Loiu and describe the Ertzaintza\u2019s police action as \u201cprovocations\u201d. He did so after one of the activists \u2014 Jos\u00e9 Javier Oses, convicted in France to eight years in prison for belonging to ETA \u2014 pushed and struck an officer, which triggered the police charge. A public security official apologized for the actions of his own police following an incident started by a convicted terrorist. The Ertzaintza officers deserve, in any case, the recognition that their counselor denied them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Sumar, Podemos and Bildu use Parliament to give a platform to someone sanctioned by the US Treasury. After the interception of the flotilla, Sumar, ERC, Bildu, Podemos, BNG and Comprom\u00eds jointly requested the appearance in Congress of Saif Abu Keshek \u2014 designated a terrorist by the US Department of the Treasury on May 19, 2026 \u2014 so that he could recount his detention. In parallel, Sumar, ERC and Bildu requested the appearance of Minister Albares to explain the measures taken after what they called the \u201ckidnapping\u201d of the flotilla. EH Bildu demanded the immediate release of those detained at Loiu. Podemos Euskadi condemned the Ertzaintza charges. Sumar Mugimendua described them as \u201cintolerable\u201d. Three parties with parliamentary representation put their institutions at the service of the narrative of a network sanctioned by Washington. (Sources: EFE Agency; Infobae, May 13 and 21, 2026.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf S\u00e1nchez removes ETA from the EU terrorist list and demands the release of the flotilla coordinator. In January 2026, the Government agreed with Bildu not to renew ETA\u2019s presence on the EU list of terrorist organizations \u2014 a list on which ETA had appeared since 2001, after 9\/11, and which is reviewed every six months. The same Government that that same week did nothing to prevent the inclusion of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on that list refused to renew ETA\u2019s: 800 murders, thousands injured, 376 unsolved crimes, and no ETA member who has collaborated with justice. Victims\u2019 associations \u2014 AVT, Dignity and Justice \u2014 described it as a betrayal. In that same period, Minister Albares exerted diplomatic pressure to demand the release of Saif Abu Keshek, flotilla coordinator, legally detained by Israel and sanctioned by the US Treasury for financing terrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Public subsidies and financial opacity. Organizations identified in the ecosystem supporting the flotilla have received public subsidies for years. NGO Monitor identifies the Basque Government as the public institution that has granted the most subsidies in Europe to Addameer \u2014 an NGO formally designated by the US Department of the Treasury in June 2025 for acting on behalf of the PFLP, with 15 members of its board having documented links to that terrorist organization. Verifiable transfers from public sources of the Basque Government itself include \u20ac150,000 (2021) and an additional \u20ac78,000 via eLankidetza, plus hundreds of thousands more through intermediaries such as Mundubat. The city councils of Vitoria-Gasteiz and Donostia also funded Addameer directly. The total estimated since 2014: at least 6 million euros to Palestinian NGOs with documented links to the PFLP. No Spanish authority has opened an investigation. Anti-money laundering regulations require justifying the origin of the money in transactions of this scale. The question is how much longer the Government can ignore that legal obligation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n THE GOVERNMENT\u2019S RESPONSIBILITY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The US confirms what Spain denies. On May 19, 2026, the US Department of the Treasury (OFAC) sanctioned Saif Abu Keshek \u2014 a Spanish citizen and coordinator of the Sumud flotilla \u2014 as a member of the General Secretariat of the PCPA, an organization designated as terrorist by the Treasury for financing Hamas and by Israel since 2021. The same network that connects the flotilla with the PFLP \u2014 the group that trained ETA in Yemen \u2014 has been identified and sanctioned by Washington. Meanwhile, the S\u00e1nchez Government sent Minister Albares to request his release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Four questions that the S\u00e1nchez Government has not answered:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The ETA-PFLP connection is not history. It is the precedent of a pattern that repeats today under different names. International terrorism feeds on itself, shares techniques and structures, and seeks the complicity of weak or ideologically aligned states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SOURCES AND DOCUMENTATION<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf PFLP training of ETA in Yemen (1980) \u00b7 Florencio Dom\u00ednguez, \u201cETA: Organizational Strategy and Actions 1978\u20131992\u201d \u00b7 Doctoral thesis, UPV-EHU \u00a1Perfecto! Copia y pega todo lo que necesites. Si quieres alguna parte m\u00e1s corta o alg\u00fan ajuste, av\u00edsame.<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Sumud flotilla is not an isolated episode. It is the most recent expression of a network of complicity between Palestinian terrorism and violent Basque separatism that has been operating for more than four decades \u2014 with the same ideological substrate, the same support circuits, and the same permissiveness from the S\u00e1nchez Government. THE HISTORICAL […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,413,16],"tags":[434,460,431],"class_list":["post-10572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-en","category-research","category-uncategorized","tag-israel-2","tag-pflp","tag-spain-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/a-com.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\u25cf PFLP episodes in Spain (1975, 1982) \u00b7 Gaizka Fern\u00e1ndez-Soldevilla, \u201cTerrorism in Spain\u201d
\u25cf PFLP in Madrid demonstration (January 2024) \u00b7 Vozp\u00f3puli \u00b7 30\/01\/2024
\u25cf Terrorist designation of the PFLP \u00b7 EU: Regulation CE 2580\/2001 \u00b7 US: OFAC \u00b7 Canada: Public Safety Canada
\u25cf Samidoun visit to the PFLP in Lebanon (July 2021) \u00b7 Terrorist designation: OFAC; Public Safety Canada \u00b7 Outlawed in Germany: Bundesministerium des Innern, October 2023
\u25cf ETA \u201cdetainees\u2019 manual\u201d \u00b7 Seized in operation against the Araba commando (1998) \u00b7 Judicial summary of Gestoras Pro Amnist\u00eda
\u25cf OFAC sanction on Saif Abu Keshek \u00b7 U.S. Department of the Treasury \u00b7 19\/05\/2026
\u25cf Cyber Neptune SL (CIF B22434260) \u00b7 Spanish Commercial Registry \u00b7 Transfer to Abu Keshek: 22\/08\/2025
\u25cf Hamas documents on the PCPA and Abu Keshek \u00b7 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) \u00b7 September 2025
\u25cf Designation of the PCPA as a Hamas organization \u00b7 Israel Ministry of Defense \u00b7 August 2021
\u25cf Jos\u00e9 Javier Oses and Itziar Moreno (ETA convictions in 2026 and 2025 flotillas) \u00b7 EFE Agency \u00b7 26\/05\/2026
\u25cf EU terrorist list \u00b7 Common Position 2001\/931\/PESC of the Council \u00b7 27\/12\/2001
\u25cf Agreement not to renew ETA on the EU list \u00b7 El Debate \u00b7 31\/01\/2026
\u25cf Hamas financing by Iran (100\u2013200 million $\/year) \u00b7 U.S. Department of the Treasury \u00b7 Washington Institute for Near East Policy
\u25cf Sumud flotilla 2025 fundraising (+4 million \u20ac, IAC) \u00b7 OKDIARIO \u00b7 May 2026
\u25cf Basque Government as largest European funder of Addameer \u00b7 NGO Monitor \u00b7 June 2025
\u25cf OFAC designation of Addameer \u00b7 US Treasury \u00b7 June 2025
\u25cf eLankidetza subsidy to Addameer (\u20ac150,000, 2021)
\u25cf Abu Keshek congressional appearance \u00b7 Infobae \u00b7 13\/05\/2026
\u25cf Albares appearance \u00b7 Infobae \u00b7 21\/05\/2026
\u25cf Statements by Bildu, Podemos and Sumar after Loiu \u00b7 Cuba en Resumen \u00b7 24\/05\/2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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