Khalil al-Wazir

Khalil al-Wazir was born in 1935 to 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. 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. 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. ==Formation of Fatah==

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." 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. 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. 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==

and Abu Jihad meet Gamal Abdel Nasser upon arrival in Cairo to attend first emergency Arab League summit, 1970 During the Black September clashes in Jordan, al-Wazir supplied the encircled Palestinian forces in Jerash and Ajlun with arms and aid, Then, along with the other PLO leaders, he relocated to Beirut. 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. ==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. 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. On 14 April, six Mossad operatives arrived in Tunis on flights from Europe. Three of them rented two Volkswagen Transporters and a Peugeot 305, which would be used to ferry the raiding force from the beach to his home. Another three were deployed as lookouts, positioning themselves behind a clump of trees to monitor his home and ensure that he was there. Under the plan, the drivers would evacuate by sea with the commandos while the lookouts would leave Tunisia on commercial flights after the operation. The raiding force then evacuated to the beach and returned to the missile boats. The local police were distracted by multiple false reports placed by Mossad agents of a convoy of cars racing from Al-Wazir's neighborhood towards downtown Tunis - the opposite direction from the one taken by the raiding force. A different version has it he was working on a memo to leaders of the Intifada, and only had time to fire off one shot from his pistol when the assassination squad burst into his rooms. He was shot at close range, reportedly 70 times, in the presence of his wife Intissar and his son Nidal, above whose bed a commando then fired a burst of automatic fire as a warning. Another account posits that the assassins gained entry to the PLO compound via IDs stolen from kidnapped Lebanese fishermen. Following his assassination, riots immediately broke out in the Palestinian territories, and at least a dozen Palestinians were shot dead in the worst show of violence since the outbreak of the uprising. The United States Department of State condemned his killing as an "act of political assassination". The UN Security Council approved Resolution 611 condemning "the aggression perpetrated against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Tunisia", without specifically mentioning Israel. ==Personal life==

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. Intissar later became head of the Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund, the organization that provides stipends to the families of Palestinians killed or wounded during confrontations with Israeli authorities. His son Jihad al-Wazir is formerly the governor of the Palestinian Monetary Authority and currently works for the International Monetary Fund. After Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, 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." In 2014, the Palestinian Authority named a forest in the West Bank as the Martyr Khalil Al-Wazir Forest. ==See also==