Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad)
صلاح خلف (أبو إياد)
Co-founder of Fatah and head of PLO intelligence and security
The Jaffa-born co-founder of Fatah who ran the PLO's security apparatus, was among the first Palestinian leaders to advocate a two-state solution, and was assassinated in Tunis in 1991 by an agent of the Abu Nidal group.
Salah Khalaf was born in Jaffa on 31 August 1933 and fled with his family to Gaza in 1948. He studied at the University of Cairo, taking degrees in philosophy and psychology together with a teacher’s diploma, and it was there, through the General Union of Palestinian Students, that he met Yasir Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir; he became president of the students’ organisation before devoting himself fully to political work. He taught in Gaza from 1957 and then in Kuwait from 1959, and in Kuwait that year he joined Arafat and al-Wazir in founding Fatah, taking charge of what the movement called the mobilisation of the masses.
Within the movement and the PLO, Khalaf — Abu Iyad — became the security man. He was named head of PLO internal security and intelligence at the end of 1967, and from July 1981 headed the security departments of both Fatah and the PLO, making him the organisation’s second-ranking figure after Arafat. Israeli and Western governments associated him with the Black September organisation that emerged after the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan in 1970-71 and carried out the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; he denied commanding it. It was Khalaf who publicly defended the murdered Rome representative Wael Zuaiter as a man “energetically” opposed to political violence, and who eulogised Kamal Nasser in 1973 as “the conscience of the Palestinian revolution.”
His politics shifted earlier than most of his generation. By November 1973 he was one of the first Palestinian leaders to advocate a two-state solution, and he backed the PLO’s 1988 declaration of independence and its acceptance of a negotiated settlement. On the night of 14-15 January 1991 he was assassinated in Tunis, together with the Fatah security chief Hayel Abdul Hamid, by a bodyguard acting as an agent of the Abu Nidal group — the dissident faction that had broken with Fatah and killed several of its senior diplomats.
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Further reading
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