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 However, in its ruling, the bloc's second highest tribunal, the
General Court of the European Union, said EU member states could
maintain their freeze on Hamas's assets for three months to give
time for further review or to appeal the verdict.
Israel, which has clashed repeatedly with Europe in recent years
over Palestinian statehood ambitions, reacted with dismay.
"We expect them to immediately put Hamas back on the list," Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement, denouncing
Hamas as "a murderous terrorist organization".
Hamas holds sway in the Gaza Strip and its founding charter calls
for the destruction of Israel. It has regularly battled against
Israel, most recently in a 50-day war this summer.
Most Western countries, including the United States, agree with
Israel that it is a terror organization, pointing to indiscriminate
rocket strikes out of Gaza and waves of suicide attacks, primarily
between 1993 and 2005.
 Hamas says it is a legitimate resistance movement and contested the
European Union's decision in 2001 to include it on the EU terrorist
list. It welcomed Wednesday's verdict.
"The decision is a correction of a historical mistake the European
Union had made," Deputy Hamas chief Moussa Abu Marzouk told Reuters.
"Hamas is a resistance movement and it has a natural right according
to all international laws and standards to resist the occupation,"
Marzouk said.
The EU court did not consider the merits of whether Hamas should be
classified as a terror group, but reviewed the original
decision-making process. This, it said, did not include the
considered opinion of competent authorities, but rather relied on
media and Internet reports.
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"The court stresses that those annulments, on fundamental procedural
grounds, do not imply any substantive assessment of the question of
the classification of Hamas as a terrorist group," the court said in
a statement.
It added that if an appeal was brought before the EU's top court,
the European Court of Justice, the freeze of Hamas funds should
continue until the legal process was complete.
Appeals, which can only be based on points of law, typically last
about a year and a half.
The EU's ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen told Israel's
Army Radio the body aimed to keep Hamas on the list.
"Sometimes the courts come to decisions which surprise us. We need
to assemble a stronger case for the listing and this is what we are
going to do," Faaborg-Andersen said.
(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem
and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Robert-Jan Bartunek and
Crispian Balmer)
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