The Verdun Street Raid

On the night of 9–10 April 1973, Israeli special forces landed on the Beirut seafront and drove into the city in civilian cars. Part of the force — commandos of Sayeret Matkal, some disguised as women; the future prime minister Ehud Barak wore a brunette wig — went to two apartment buildings on Verdun Street, blew open the doors, and shot dead three of the PLO’s senior leaders in their homes: Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar (Abu Yusuf), head of the PLO political department and a member of its executive committee; Kamal Adwan, who directed operations in the occupied territories; and Kamal Nasser, the PLO’s spokesman and one of Palestine’s best-known poets. Al-Najjar’s wife was killed with him.

Israel presented the raid — part of the campaign that followed Munich — as a strike at Black September’s leadership. More than fifty Palestinians were killed across Beirut that night in coordinated attacks on PFLP and Fatah buildings, along with Lebanese policemen and civilians; two Israeli soldiers died. That the commandos moved freely through the Lebanese capital exposed the state’s inability to protect the Palestinians on its soil, deepened the crisis between the Lebanese government and the PLO, and fed the tensions sliding toward the civil war of 1975.

A quarter of a million people — a tenth of Lebanon’s population — turned out for the funeral of the three men in Beirut, and tens of thousands demonstrated elsewhere in the country. Kamal Nasser, a Christian and the PLO’s public voice, became the raid’s emblem; by Palestinian accounts he was shot before his family, the bullet wounds tracing the sign of the cross.