Khalil al-Wazir

Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir, known by his nom de guerre Abu Jihad, was born on 10 October 1935 in Ramla in British Mandatory Palestine. His family fled to the Gaza Strip during the 1948 war, an exile that defined the rest of his life. As a teenager in Gaza he organised his first fedayeen cell and was briefly imprisoned by Egyptian authorities for cross-border raids.

While studying in Cairo in the late 1950s he met Yasser Arafat, and together with Salah Khalaf and a small circle of exiled Palestinian students they founded Fatah in Kuwait at the end of the decade, formally launching armed operations on 1 January 1965. Within Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation he ran the Western Sector, the directorate responsible for operations inside Israel and the occupied territories, becoming Arafat's deputy and chief military planner.

He was widely linked to the 1978 Coastal Road bus attack and to running networks during the First Intifada that erupted in December 1987. Israel held him personally responsible, and in the early hours of 16 April 1988 a unit of Sayeret Matkal commandos, transported by sea, assaulted his villa in Sidi Bou Said outside Tunis and shot him dead in front of his wife Intissar and their daughter.

His funeral in Damascus drew hundreds of thousands; in 2012 Israel formally acknowledged the operation. He left memoirs and an unfinished history of Fatah.

The masculine given name Khalil comes from the Arabic khalīl meaning close friend or intimate companion, a traditional epithet of the prophet Abraham. He carried it through four decades of clandestine struggle.