EU flags in front of the European Commission building in Brussels. Photo: Amio Cajander via Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – European Union (EU) Ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Anderson said that the 28-member bloc of countries still considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization, despite an EU court’s decision on Wednesday to remove the Palestinian terror group from its blacklist.

“It’s a technical, procedural decision that the court has reached. It doesn’t change the political position of the EU vis-à-vis Hamas, which is still that it’s a terror organization,” Faaborg-Andersen told The Times of Israel.

“It’s important to point out that this has no immediate effect in terms of unfreezing the sanctions that we have against Hamas,” he said. “We have an asset freeze against Hamas and Hamas members and that will stay in place.”

Faaborg-Anderson also said that Hamas is “deliberately mischaracterizing” the court’s move. Senior Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk called the decision a “correction of a historic mistake.”

“Hamas is a resistance movement and it has a natural right according to all international laws and standards to resist the occupation,” he told Reuters.

While the EU’s General Court ruled that Hamas should not be listed as a terrorist organization, it stated that its decision was made on procedural grounds and did not constitute a “substantive assessment” of the issue.