A German court on Wednesday affirmed for the first time the government’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist group, and handed four of its members prison terms ranging from 4.5 years to six years.
The sentenced terrorists, aged 36-58, were arrested in December 2023 for stockpiling weapons for a Hamas attack on Jewish, Israeli or other targets, Lisa Jani, spokesperson for the Berlin criminal courts, wrote in a statement.
During the trial at the First Criminal Senate of the Berlin Court of Appeal – State Security Senate, the judges affirmed that Hamas “constitutes a foreign terrorist organization under the German Criminal Code,” Jani said. The Berlin Court of Appeals is the highest court of the German state of Berlin.
The ruling may help guarantee the legal grounds of the German government’s executive decision in 2023 to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, and create a precedent that could complicate attempts by Hamas’s advocates to have the classification reversed.
“Hamas, a Sunni organization with a militant-extremist orientation that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, undoubtedly fulfills the elements of the offense defined in Sections 129a and 129b of the Criminal Code,” the presiding judge of the Senate stated in her oral explanation of the verdict.
Although Hamas has been listed as a terrorist organization by the European Union for years, “it has not yet been classified as such under German law,” the judge noted, adding that Wednesday’s ruling, assigned the docket number PM 15/2026, had corrected this.
The defendants—identified to the media by the criminal courts system as Abdelhamid Al A., 47; Mohamed B., 36; Ibrahim El-R., 43; and Nazih R., 58—were all born in Lebanon and came to Germany or Europe many years ago. They acted as “foreign operatives for Hamas,” the court said.
The defendants had been “personally tasked by their contact in Lebanon, a high-ranking Hamas official, with locating the organization’s underground weapons caches in Poland, Denmark and Bulgaria, inspecting the weapons stockpiles, and reburying them,” the Berlin criminal courts spokesperson added.
The ruling was based on “extensive communication between the defendants, both amongst themselves and with their Hamas contact and other individuals,” the spokesperson also said.
German prosecutors are preparing indictments against additional alleged Hamas operatives in custody.
On March 6, Cypriot authorities arrested another Lebanese man who is wanted in Germany in connection with allegations that he helped Hamas obtain weapons.
In November, German authorities uncovered and arrested a suspected Hamas terrorist cell with at least five members who had plotted attacks on Israeli or Jewish targets, German prosecutors said. One of those suspects was identified as Lebanon-born Borhan El-K. He was apprehended while entering Germany from the Czech Republic, the federal prosecutor’s office said.
