Fathi Shaqaqi

Fathi Shaqaqi was born on 4 January 1951 in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, the eldest child of a labourer whose family had been driven out of the village of Zarnuqa, southwest of Ramla, in 1948. He was schooled in UNRWA classrooms, graduated from the Bir al-Sabi’ Secondary School for Boys in 1968, and enrolled at Birzeit College to study mathematics before working as a teacher in Jerusalem. Drawn first to Nasserism, he was thrown back on his beliefs by the defeat of 1967 and gravitated to the Muslim Brotherhood, which he joined after being introduced to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. In 1974 he sat the secondary examination a second time to raise his grades and entered the medical faculty of Zaqaziq University in Egypt.

The Iranian revolution of February 1979 was the second landmark of his life. He wrote a book that year, Khomeini: The Islamic and Alternative Solution, for which the Egyptian authorities arrested him; he was arrested again that July and held four months in the Qal’a prison. He severed his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — he had concluded it spoke too little of Palestine — and in early 1980, with Palestinian colleagues at Zaqaziq, began building the group that became the Islamic Jihad Movement. Pursued by Egyptian security, he returned secretly to Palestine in November 1981, worked two years at the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem, then practised as a pediatrician in Gaza while leading the movement, whose secret cells launched their armed struggle in 1984. He rejected the Islamist thesis that the liberation of Palestine must wait for the creation of an Islamic state, and played a central role in turning political Islamism in Palestine onto the path of armed struggle.

The occupation authorities arrested him in 1983 and held him eleven months; in 1986 they sentenced him to four years’ imprisonment with five suspended, on charges of ties to military activity, incitement against the occupation, and smuggling arms into Gaza. On 1 August 1988, before his sentence had run its course, Israel deported him, accusing him of a central role in organizing the intifada. He took refuge in Beirut and then Damascus, which became his movement’s headquarters. On 26 October 1995, as he returned from a visit to Libya, a team of Mossad agents shot him dead on the island of Malta. His body was carried to Damascus, where tens of thousands of Palestinians attended the funeral at the Yarmouk refugee camp, and he was buried in the camp’s Martyrs’ Cemetery. Those who wrote of him afterwards recorded a man committed to national unity across ideological lines, an avid reader of world literature and philosophy who loved above all the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.

Sources

• Fathi Shiqaqi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question