Wadie Haddad

Wadi (Wadie) Haddad was born in Safad in 1927. His father taught Arabic at a secondary school in Haifa, and Haddad was schooled there — a strong mathematician and a runner. The Nakba drove the family out; they took refuge in Beirut, where Haddad entered the American University of Beirut to study medicine and met George Habash. The two became lifelong friends, took leading roles in the student society al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, and in 1952 opened a free clinic together in Amman for refugees and the poor. Haddad was among the founders of the Arab Nationalist Movement announced by Habash in Amman in December 1956, and of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in December 1967.

Within the PFLP he was given two portfolios: finance, and external military operations. From 23 July 1968 the branch he chaired began a campaign under the slogan “pursue the enemy everywhere,” starting with the hijacking of an El Al flight from Rome to Lydda airport, which was forced to land in Algiers and whose passengers were released only after Israel freed Palestinian prisoners. Between 6 and 9 September 1970 the branch hijacked three Western airliners to a desert strip near Zarqa in Jordan that it named “Revolution Airport,” evacuated the passengers and crew, and blew the aircraft up on 12 September — the immediate trigger for the war between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian factions. Haddad also built the branch’s alliances with the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades; on 30 May 1972 three Japanese Red Army members trained by his branch opened fire in the arrivals hall at Lydda airport, killing twenty-six people, most of them Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico.

The front’s own leadership had by then turned against the method. Habash stated publicly in Beirut on 14 March 1972 that the PFLP executive committee had resolved on 5 November 1970 to stop hijacking aircraft. Haddad refused to comply. When he organised the hijacking of an Air France flight to Entebbe in June 1976, the PFLP expelled him along with every member of the external operations branch; he continued under the name Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations.

Haddad fell ill in late 1977, was moved to Algeria in January 1978 and then to the Charité hospital in East Berlin, where he died on 28 March 1978, aged fifty-one. The death was first reported as leukaemia. Israeli accounts later stated that the Mossad had killed him with a slow-acting poison introduced into Belgian chocolates delivered to him — the version now carried by the Palestinian national information centre and by Habash’s own biographers, who record the loss as one of the two that marked Habash most, the other being the killing of Ghassan Kanafani.

Selected contributions

• Co-founder of the Arab Nationalist Movement (1956) and of the PFLP (1967)
• Head of the PFLP’s external operations branch (1968–1976)

Sources

• Wadi Haddad — Palestinian National Information Centre (WAFA)
• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — PalQuest
• George Habash — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• Palestinians in Beirut mark 50 years since the Lod airport attack — The Times of Israel