Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir (Arabic: خليل إبراهيم الوزير; 10 October 1935 – 16 April 1988), also known by his kunya Abu Jihad (أبو جهاد), was a Palestinian leader and co-founder of the nationalist party Fatah. As a top aide of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat, al-Wazir had considerable influence in Fatah's military activities, eventually becoming the commander of Fatah's armed wing al-Assifa.
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 besieged 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, the Israeli military prevailed and al-Wazir was exiled from Lebanon with the rest of the Fatah leadership. He 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 formed a major component of the Palestinian forces in the First Intifada. However, he did not live to command the uprising. On 16 April 1988, he was assassinated at his home in Tunis by Israeli commandos.
Early life
Khalil al-Wazir was born in 1935 to Sunni Muslim parents in the city of Ramla, Palestine, then under British Mandatory rule. His father, Ibrahim al-Wazir, worked as a grocer in the city. Al-Wazir and his family were expelled in July 1948, along with another 50,000–70,000 Palestinians from Lydda and Ramla, 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 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, Egypt. 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 to teach after moving to Kuwait in 1959.
Al-Wazir 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 Palestinian nationalist guerrilla and political organization, sometime between 1959 and 1960. He moved to Beirut after being put in charge of editing the newly formed organization's monthly magazine Falastinuna, Nida' Al Hayat ("Our Palestine, the Call to Life"), as he was "the only one with a flair for writing." The magazine was established by Arafat and Al Wazir in November 1959.
Al Wazir 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). While in Algiers, he recruited Abu Ali Iyad who became his deputy and one of the high-ranking commanders of al-Assifa in Syria and Jordan.
Syria and post-Six-Day War
Al-Wazir and the Fatah leadership settled in Damascus, Syria in 1965, in order take advantage of the large number of Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) members there. On 9 May 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 Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which developed his credentials as a military strategist. This eventually led to him taking 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.
Black September and the Lebanon War
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 Hotel attack in 1975, in which eight Fatah militants raided and took civilian 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. Other attacks he was implicated in include the 1974 Nahariya attack, the Zion Square refrigerator bombing, and the 1980 Hebron attack.
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.
Establishing a movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip
Dissatisfied at the decisive defeat of Palestinian forces in Lebanon during the 1982 Lebanon War, al-Wazir concentrated on establishing a solid Fatah base in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. 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 "shaking off", 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 7 June 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 took place upon escalation of two unrelated incidents in the Gaza Strip. The first was a traffic incident at the Erez checkpoint, where an Israeli military vehicle hit a group of Palestinian laborers, killing four of them. The funerals, attended by 10,000 people from the camp that evening, quickly led to a large demonstration. Rumours swept the camp that the incident was an act of intentional retaliation for the second event - stabbing to death of an Israeli businessman, killed while shopping in Gaza two days earlier. Following the throwing of a petrol bomb at a passing patrol car in the Gaza Strip on the following day, Israeli forces, firing with live ammunition and tear gas canisters into angry crowds, shot one young Palestinian dead and wounded 16 others.
However, within weeks, following persistent requests by al-Wazir, the PLO attempted to direct the uprising, which lasted until 1991, or 1993, according to various authorities. Al-Wazir had been assigned by Arafat the responsibility of the 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.
Assassination
Al-Wazir was assassinated in an Israeli commando raid in his home in Tunis on the early morning of 16 April 1988 at the age of 52.
The Israeli government had decided to assassinate him after the outbreak of the First Intifada. Israel accused al-Wazir of escalating the violence of the Intifada, which was ongoing at the time of his assassination. The Mothers' Bus attack, a March 1988 hijacking of an Israeli bus believed to have been organized by Al-Wazir in which three Israeli civilians were killed, was a major catalyst in pushing the Israeli government to approve the assassination.
In his book Rise and Kill First, which was based on interviews with Israeli military and intelligence personnel, Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman provided a detailed account of the assassination. The Israeli security cabinet under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir met on 14 March 1988 to discuss assassinating him. Although Shamir could have given the order on his own, he was aware of the potential ramifications of assassinating such a high-profile figure and did not want to take sole responsibility. The security cabinet approved the assassination by a vote of 6 to 4. The Washington Post reported on 21 April that the Israeli cabinet approved al-Wazir's assassination on 13 April.
The assassination, codenamed Operation Introductory Lesson, had been planned by the Mossad for over a year. Mossad agents had scouted routes to his home from the nearby beach and mapped his neighborhood. The Mossad and Israeli military intelligence had tracked his movements and tapped his telephone lines. Under the plan, a naval flotilla backed by air cover would land commandos on the Tunisian coast, where they would be driven to his home by waiting Mossad agents and kill him. Ehud Barak, the IDF Deputy Chief of Staff, was placed in overall command of the operation.