Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad)

Khalil al-Wazir was born in Ramla on 10 October 1935 and was forced out of his hometown in July 1948 when Zionist militias occupied it and evicted its inhabitants; the family made its way through Ramallah and Hebron before settling in Gaza. He attended an UNRWA elementary school there and graduated from Palestine School in 1954. In 1952 he had joined the Muslim Brotherhood, becoming secretary of its Gaza student branch; he left when its leadership refused to endorse his proposal for armed struggle, and began organising military cells that carried out operations across the armistice line — one of them destroyed the Zohar water cistern near Beit Hanun on 25 February 1955. When Israeli forces attacked Gaza on 28 February 1955 in retaliation, al-Wazir helped lead a mass demonstration whose signs read “Enlist us in the army and save us” and “Train us and you will help us.” Soon afterwards he met Yasir Arafat for the first time.

By 1957 the two men, then in Kuwait, had agreed to establish a secret organisation to liberate Palestine through armed struggle. In November 1959 they met in Kuwait with young Palestinians from several Arab countries, and the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine — Fatah — was established; al-Wazir was chosen for its first central committee and remained a member until his death. He edited the periodical “Call of Life — Our Palestine” from Beirut in 1959, formed secret Fatah cells in the West Bank between 1960 and 1962, opened the first Palestine bureau in Algeria in 1963, and travelled with Arafat to China in March 1964, where the leadership agreed to open a Palestine office in Peking. From Damascus he directed contacts with guerrilla cells inside Palestine after al-Asifa, Fatah’s military wing, carried out its first operation on the night of 31 December 1964, blowing up an Israeli water installation at the Ilbun tunnel.

After June 1967 he organised military operations against Israeli forces in the Upper Galilee, and following the September 1970 confrontation with the Jordanian army he moved with the movement to Lebanon. When an Israeli unit assassinated Kamal Adwan in Beirut in April 1973, al-Wazir took over supervision of Fatah’s activity inside occupied Palestine — the Western Sector. At Fatah’s fourth congress in Damascus in May 1980 he was elected deputy to commander-in-chief Arafat. He played a leading role in the resistance to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, moved with the PLO to Tunis, and from 1984 headed the Palestinian delegation in the Palestinian-Jordanian Joint Committee, building up civil institutions in the occupied territories — the Youth student movement, the Women’s Committees for Social Work, and the labour unions.

Al-Wazir was one of the principal architects of the First Intifada, which broke out in December 1987, and took part in leading and supplying it until his death. On 16 April 1988 an Israeli unit of Sayeret Matkal, led by Major Moshe Yaalon — later Israel’s chief of staff and defence minister — assassinated him in his house in Sidi Bou Said, Tunis. His body was taken to Damascus, where tens of thousands walked in his funeral, and he was buried in the Martyrs’ Cemetery of Yarmouk refugee camp. His wife and cousin, Intissar al-Wazir (Umm Jihad), later became the Palestinian Authority’s first minister of social affairs.

Sources

• Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• The Palestinian National Liberation Movement – Fatah (I) — PalQuest