October 10, 2011 <Back to Index>
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Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir (Arabic: خليل إبراهيم الوزير), also known by his kunya "Abu Jihad" (أبو جهاد — father of the struggle) (October 10, 1935 – April 16, 1988), was a Palestinian military leader and founder of the secular political party Fatah. As a top aide of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman, Yasser Arafat, al-Wazir had considerable influence in Fatah's military activities, eventually becoming the commander of Fatah's armed wing al-Assifa. The majority of the Palestinians viewed him as a martyr who died resisting the Israeli occupation or at least sympathized with his cause, while most Israelis considered him to be a high-profile terrorist for planning the killings of Israelis. Al-Wazir
became a refugee when his family was
expelled from Ramla
during the 1948
Arab-Israeli War, and began leading a minor fedayeen force in the Gaza Strip.
In the early 1960s, he established connections for Fatah with Communist regimes and prominent third
world leaders. He opened Fatah's first bureau in Algeria.
He played an important role in the 1970 - 71 Black September clashes in Jordan,
by supplying surrounded Palestinian fighters with weapons and aid.
Following the PLO's defeat by the Jordanian Army,
al-Wazir joined the PLO in Lebanon.
Prior to and during Israel's 1982
invasion of Lebanon, al-Wazir planned numerous attacks inside
Israel against both civilian and military targets. He prepared Beirut's
defense against incoming Israeli forces. Nonetheless, Israel prevailed
and he was exiled from Lebanon with the rest of the Fatah leadership.
Al-Wazir settled in Amman for a two-year period and
was then exiled to Tunis in 1986. From his base
there, he started to organize youth committees in the Palestinian
territories; these eventually became the backbone of the
Palestinian forces in the First Intifada.
However,
he did not live to command the uprising: on April 16, 1988, he
was assassinated at his home in Tunis, apparently by Israeli commandos. Khalil
al-Wazir was born in 1935 to Muslim parents in the city of Ramla, Palestine,
then under the jurisdiction of the British.
His father, Ibrahim al-Wazir, worked as a grocer in the city.
Al-Wazir and his family were expelled from Ramla in July 1948, along
with another 50,000 - 70,000 Palestinians, following Israel's capture of the
area during the
1948 Arab-Israeli War. They settled in the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip,
where al-Wazir attended a secondary school run by the UNRWA. While in high school, he began
organizing a small group of fedayeen to harass Israelis at
military posts near the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. In 1954,
he came into contact with Yasser Arafat in Gaza;
al-Wazir would become Arafat's right-hand man later in his life. During
his time in Gaza, al-Wazir became a member of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood, and was briefly imprisoned for
his membership with the organization, as it was prohibited in Egypt. In 1956, a few months after his
release from prison, he received military training in Cairo. He also studied architectural
engineering at
the University of
Alexandria, but he did not graduate.
Al-Wazir was detained once again in 1957 for leading raids against
Israel and was exiled to Saudi Arabia,
finding work as a schoolteacher. He
continued his job after moving to Kuwait in 1959. Al-Wazir's
used
his time in Kuwait to further his ties with Arafat and other
fellow Palestinian exiles he had met in Egypt. He and his comrades
founded Fatah, a
secular Palestinian
nationalist guerrilla
and political organization, sometime between 1959-60. He moved to Beirut after
being put in charge of editing the newly formed organization's monthly
magazine Filastinuna,
Nida' al-Hayat ("Our
Palestine, the Call to Life"), as he was "the only one with a flair for
writing." He
settled in Algeria in 1962, after a delegation
of Fatah leaders, including Arafat and Farouk Kaddoumi,
were invited there by Algerian
President Ahmed Ben Bella.
Al-Wazir remained there, opened a Fatah office and military training
camp in Algiers and was included in an
Algerian - Fatah delegation to Beijing in 1964. During his visit, he presented
Fatah's ideas to various leaders of the People's Republic of China,
including premier Zhou Enlai, and thus inaugurated Fatah's
good relationship with China. He also toured other East Asian countries, establishing
relations with North Korea and the Viet Cong. Al-Wazir supposedly "charmed Che Guevara"
during Guevara's speech in Algiers. With
his guerrilla credentials and his contacts with arms supplying nations,
he was assigned the role of recruiting and training fighters, thus
establishing Fatah's armed wing al-Assifa (the Storm). Al-Wazir
and the Fatah leadership settled in Damascus, Syria, in 1965, in order to take
advantage of the large number of Palestine
Liberation Army (PLA)
members there. On May 9, 1966, he and Arafat were detained by Syrian
police loyal to air marshal Hafez al-Assad after an incident where a
pro-Syrian Palestinian leader, Yusuf
Orabi was
thrown out of the window of a three-story building and killed. Al-Wazir
and Arafat were either considering uniting Fatah with Orabi's faction —
the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine — or winning
Orabi's support against Arafat's rivals within the Fatah leadership. An
argument occurred, eventually leading to Orabi's murder; however,
al-Wazir and Arafat had already left the scene shortly before the
incident. According to Aburish, Orabi and Assad were "close friends"
and Assad appointed a panel to investigate what happened. The panel
found both Arafat and al-Wazir guilty, but Salah Jadid,
then Deputy Secretary - General of the President of
Syria, pardoned them. After the
defeat of a coalition of Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day War,
major
Palestinian guerrilla organizations that participated in the war
or were sponsored by any of the involved Arab states, such as the Arab
Nationalist Movement led
by George Habash and the Palestine
Liberation Army of Ahmad Shukeiri,
lost considerable influence among the Palestinian population. This made
Fatah the dominant faction of the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO).
They gained 33 of 105 seats in the Palestinian
National Council (PNC) (the most seats allocated to any
guerrilla group), thus strengthening al-Wazir's position. During the Battle of
Karameh, in March 1968, he and Salah Khalaf held important
command positions among Fatah fighters against the Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF),
which developed his credentials as a military strategist. This eventually led to him
staking command of al-Assifa,
holding major positions in the PNC, and the Supreme Military
Council of the PLO. He was also put in charge of guerrilla
warfare operations
in both the occupied
Palestinian territories and
Israel proper. During the Black September
clashes in
Jordan, al-Wazir supplied the encircled Palestinian forces in Jerash and Ajlun with arms and aid, but the conflict was decided in
Jordan's favor. After Arafat and thousands of Fatah fighters retreated
to Lebanon,
al-Wazir negotiated an agreement between King Hussein and the PLO's leading
organizer, calling for better Palestinian conduct in Jordan. Then,
along with the other PLO leaders, he relocated to Beirut. Al-Wazir
did not play a major role in the Lebanese Civil
War; he confined himself primarily to strengthening the Lebanese
National Movement, the PLO's main ally in the conflict. During the fall of the Tel
al-Zaatar camp to
the Lebanese Front,
al-Wazir blamed himself for not organizing a rescue effort.
During his time in Lebanon, al-Wazir was responsible for coordinating
high profile operations. He allegedly planned the Savoy Operation in 1975, in which eight
Fatah militants raided and took hostages in the Savoy hotel in Tel Aviv,
killing eight of them, as well as three Israeli soldiers. The Coastal Road
massacre, in March 1978, was also planned by al-Wazir. In this
attack, six Fatah members hijacked a bus and killed 35 Israeli
civilians. When Israel besieged
Beirut in
1982, al-Wazir, disagreed with the PLO's leftist members and Salah
Khalaf; he proposed that the PLO pull out of Beirut. Nevertheless,
al-Wazir and his aide Abu al-Walid planned Beirut's defense and helped
direct PLO forces against the IDF. PLO forces were eventually
defeated and then expelled from Lebanon, with most of the leadership
relocating to Tunis,
although al-Wazir and 264 other PLO members were received by King
Hussein of Jordan. Dissatisfied
at
the decisive defeat of Palestinian forces during the 1982 Lebanon
War, al-Wazir concentrated on establishing a solid Fatah base in the
Palestinian territories. In 1982, he began to sponsor youth committees
in the territories. These organizations would grow and initiate the First Intifada in December 1987 (the word Intifada in Arabic,
literally translated as "tremor", is generally used to describe an
uprising or revolt). The
Intifada began as an uprising of Palestinian youth against the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On June 7, 1986, about a year
before the Intifada started, al-Wazir was deported from Amman to Baghdad,
eventually moving to Tunisia days after King Hussein
declared that efforts in establishing a joint strategy for the Israeli -
Palestinian conflict between
Jordan and the PLO were over. The first
stage of the Intifada was a response to an incident at the Erez checkpoint,
where
an Israeli military vehicle hit a group of Palestinian laborers,
killing four of them. However, within weeks, following persistent
requests by al-Wazir, the PLO attempted to direct the uprising, which
lasted until 1992 – 93. Al-Wazir had been assigned by Arafat the
responsibility of the Palestinian territories within the PLO command.
According to author Said Aburish,
he had "impressive knowledge of local conditions" in the Israeli-occupied
territories,
apparently knowing "every village, school, and large family in Gaza and
the West Bank". He provided the uprising with financial backing and
logistical support, thus becoming its "brain in exile." Al-Wazir
activated every cell he had set up in the territories since the late
1970s in an effort to militarily back the stone throwers who formed the
backbone of the Palestinian revolt. He also used the opportunity to
reform the PLO. According
to author Yezid Sayigh,
al-Wazir
believed that the Intifada should not have been sacrificed to
Arafat solely for use as a diplomatic or political tool. Al-Wazir
was assassinated at close range in his home in Tunis at 2 a.m. UTC on April 16, 1988 at the
age of 53. He was shot multiple times in the presence of his wife and
son Nidal. Al-Wazir is
widely believed to have been assassinated by an Israeli commando team, reportedly ferried from
Israel by boat, and aided ashore by Mossad intelligence
agents. Israel accused al-Wazir of escalating the violence of the
Intifada, which was ongoing at the time of his assassination. Specifically, he was believed
to be the architect of the triple bomb attack at a shopping mall. He
was buried in the Yarmouk refugee
camp in Damascus on April 21; Arafat
led the funeral procession. In 1997,
the Maariv newspaper reported on the
assassination of al-Wazir. The report claimed that Ehud Barak led
a seaborne command center that oversaw al-Wazir's assassination.
However, Israel has never officially taken responsibility for his
killing and government spokesman Moshe Fogel and aides to Barak
declined to comment on the issue. According to the report, Barak, who
was then a deputy military chief, coordinated the planning by the
Mossad, as well as the army's intelligence
branch, the air force, navy and the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit. Barak ran
the assassination operation from a command center on a navy missile
boat off the shore of Tunis, Maariv said. Mossad intelligence
agents watched al-Wazir's home for months before the raid. The Washington Post reported that the Israeli cabinet approved al-Wazir's
assassination and that it was coordinated between the Mossad and the
IDF. The United States
Department of State condemned
his murder as an "act of political assassination", and the UN Security
Council approved Resolution 611 condemning
"the aggression perpetrated against the sovereignty and territorial
integrity of Tunisia", without specifically mentioning Israel. Al-Wazir
married his cousin Intissar
al-Wazir in
1962 and had five children with her. They had three sons, named Jihad,
Bassem and Nidal, and two daughters, named Iman and Hanan al-Wazir. Intissar and her children
returned to Gaza following the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO and
in 1996 she became the first female minister in the Palestinian
National Authority. His son Jihad al-Wazir is currently the Governor of
the Palestinian Monetary Authority. After Hamas' takeover
of the Gaza Strip in
2007,
Palestinian looters raided al-Wazir's home, reportedly stealing
his personal belongings. Intissar al-Wazir said that the looting
"occurred in broad daylight and under the watchful eye of Hamas
militiamen." |