Mahmoud Hamshari
محمود الهمشري
First PLO representative in Paris, killed by an Israeli bomb planted in his home
The schoolteacher from Umm Khalid who became the PLO's first representative in Paris, wounded by an explosive device planted by Israeli intelligence on 8 December 1972; he died of his injuries a month later.
At the funeral of Wael Zuaiter in Rome in October 1972, Mahmoud Hamshari told the dead man’s friends: “I’ll be next.” Weeks later he was.
Hamshari was born in 1938 in Umm Khalid, the coastal village the Jewish Agency renamed Netanya, and received his secondary education in Tulkarm. Like thousands of his generation he went abroad to teach, working as a schoolteacher in Kuwait and Algeria, where he joined Fatah and rose to become a PLO leader. In the 1960s he moved to France as Fatah’s representative, and became the first head of the Palestine office there — the PLO’s representative in Paris. He married a Frenchwoman, and they had a daughter.
On 8 December 1972, in the wave of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian representatives in Europe that followed the Munich attack, an explosive device planted by Israeli intelligence agents detonated in his Paris home; the operation was supervised by the former Israeli minister of information Aharon Yariv. Gravely wounded, Hamshari survived long enough to describe what had happened, and died of his injuries on 9 January 1973. A Fatah poster published in Beirut that year mourned him in these words: “Fatah presents to the cause two more of its leaders. The martyred hero Mahmoud al-Hamshari, representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Paris, martyred January 9, 1973 as a result of injuries sustained by an explosive device planted by the Zionist intelligence agents on December 8, 1972.”
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.