🇮🇱 🇵🇸 Fathi Shaqaqi: Don't Kill Him in Damascus | Al Jazeera World

A story filled with intrigue and suspense, the killing of Fathi Shaqaqi, founder of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, allegedly assassinated by Mossad in 1995.

Born in Gaza, his family was forced to leave their home fearing for their lives just prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948. They were never able to return. Shaqaqi studied at Bir Zeit University, joined the Muslim Brotherhood and worked as a maths teacher, before moving to Egypt to study medicine.

While he initially embraced the Brotherhood’s core aims of creating a political system based on Islamic laws and morals, he began to believe that military action was the only way to combat Israeli occupation. So he left to form his own organisation, Islamic Jihad in Palestine, in 1981, with the avowed aim of fighting the very existence of Israel.

He was deported to Lebanon in 1988 and then moved to Damascus as a ‘guest’ of the Syrian government. From there, he plotted the Beit Lid suicide bombing of a bus station between Tel Aviv and Haifa in January 1995 which killed 21 Israeli soldiers, leading Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin to order his assassination by the intelligence agency Mossad. There are different versions of his murder - but most agree that it would have been too complicated for Mossad to have taken him out in Damascus.

Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman is in no doubt that two agents of the Kidon wing of Mossad tracked him down to his hotel in in Malta in October 1995, shot him several times in the street and escaped via boat and submarine back to Israel.

Islamic Jihad survived Shaqaqi’s assassination and has continued its campaign, killing many Israeli soldiers and civilians in the process – but is still supported by Palestinians who challenge the Israeli occupation, intransigence over peace talks, illegal settlements in the West Bank – and indeed Israel’s right to exist at all.

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