Saleh al-Arouri assassinated in Beirut: Top Palestinian figures killed by Israel over the years

Wael Zuaiter

Zuaiter, 38, accused of having a direct connection to Munich, was second to fall victim to Israel's revenge killings. Serving as the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)'s representative to Rome, Zuaiter was shot 11 times in the lobby of his building in the Italian capital on 16 October 1972. Israel refused to bury him in his native city of Nablus in the Occupied West Bank. He was buried at the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus instead.

Mahmoud Hamshari

Hamshari, 24, was a member of Fatah and the PLO's official representative in France. He was killed by an IED planted inside his home phone on Rue d'Alesia in Paris.

Israel sent an undercover agent, pretending to be an Italian journalist, to interview him. When sure of his absence, members of Mossad planted the explosive in his home. It was detonated on 8 December 1972, severely wounding him before he succumbed to his wounds on 9 January 1973. Israel accused Hamshari of being the head of the Black September Organisation in France. 

Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar

Kamal Adwan, 38, Kamal Nasser, 49, and Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, 43, were three top Palestinian leaders killed during a famous Israeli raid on Beirut known as Operation Springs of Youth, staged on 10 April 1973.

All of them were killed in connection to Munich. Adwan was a member of Fatah's Central Committee and head of its operations in the Occupied West Bank.

An American University of Beirut graduate, Nasser was PLO spokesman and editor of its periodical Filastin al-Thawra, while Najjar was a PLO's Executive Committee member.

Israel had been monitoring their movement through an agent posing as a writer conducting research for a television series on 19th-century British traveller Lady Hester Stanhope. She stayed at an apartment facing their homes on Verdun Street in upscale Beirut.

The commandos arrived on the shores of Beirut in speedboats on the night of 9 April and carried out the assassinations early next morning. Future Prime Minister Ehud Barak was one of them.

Najjar lived in one building while Adwan and Nasser. Najjar was shot in his bedroom with his wife, while Adwan fought back with his rifle before he was gunned down. Nasser was at his desk and also fired at the assassins before he, too, was killed.

Wadie Haddad 

Haddad, 51, was a senior member of the PFLP. He was killed in a very unconventional manner, through slow poison in a box of Belgian chocolate, on 28 March 1978. Haddad was the mastermind of the famed hijacking of an Air France commercial flight operating between Paris and Tel Aviv, which was diverted first to Libya and then to Uganda on 27 June 1976.

The original cause of his death was believed to be leukaemia. Still, in 2006, Israeli author Aaron J. Klein confirmed in his book Striking Back that chocolate poisoning administered by Mossad had killed Haddad.

More recently, in 2018, investigative Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman released his book Rise and First Kill, saying that Haddad had indeed been killed by Israeli poison, not in chocolate but in his toothpaste, which had been injected with toxin developed in Israeli labs, especially for this operation.

Ali Hassan Salameh 

Salameh, 38, was the charismatic chief of operations of the Black September Organisation and founder of Yasser Arafat's elite security unit. He was killed, also by a car bomb in Beirut on 22 January 1979.

Veteran Mossad chief Michael Harari led the operation, which involved monitoring Salameh's movements for six weeks through an agent acting as an NGO staffer working with Palestinian children.

While heading to attend his mother's birthday, a Volkswagen loaded with 100-km of explosives was detonated from afar in West Beirut, severely wounding Salameh. He was rushed to the American University Hospital and died on the operating table at 4:03 PM. 

Zuheir Mohsen 

Mohsen, 43, was the secretary-general of the Syrian-backed al-Saiqa Palestinian militant group. He was gunned down in Cannes while walking out of a casino on 25 July 1979. His body was flown to Damascus for burial. Both PLO chief Yasser Arafat and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad attended his funeral.

Naji al-Ali

Al-Ali, 49, a celebrated Palestinian cartoonist, was gunned down outside the London office of a Kuwaiti newspaper on 22 July 1987. He would die from his wounds on 29 August 1987.

Initial investigations led to the arrest of a young Palestinian from Occupied Jerusalem, who first said that he was working for the PLO but later confessed that he also worked for Mossad. In other words, he was a double agent. Both organisations denied anything to do with Naji al-Ali's assassination.

Israel's lack of cooperation with Scotland Yard would lead to the expulsion of three of its diplomats from London, identified as handlers of two agents who were also planning to kill al-Ali. Then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher closed down the office of Mossad in Palace Green, Kensington — which hints, without announcement, that Israel was behind this crime as well.

Khalil al-Wazir

Al-Wazir, 52, one of Arafat's top lieutenants and a co-founder of Fatah, was killed by Mossad at his home in Tunis early in the morning on 16 April 1988. Known as Abu Jihad, he was universally believed to be Arafat's successor, and his assassination came in retaliation for his role in the First Intifada that had been raging since December 1987. Then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir ordered it.

A naval flotilla backed by air cover landed on the Tunisian coast, carrying commandos to kill Abu Jihad. Then IDF deputy chief-of-staff Ehud Barak, the man behind the Beirut assassinations of 1973, led the operation.

The commandos showed up at his home and spoke to his bodyguard, pretending to be tourists, before they killed him. They then surrounded the house and broke in, shooting the gardener, another bodyguard, and Abu Jihad himself a total of 52 times.

Atef Bseiso

Bseiso, 44, was the PLO's liaison with foreign intelligence agencies. He was assassinated in Paris on 8 June 1992. He was returning from dinner with two Lebanese friends when the assassins approached him at the front door of his hotel and shot him three times in the head.

Fathi Shaqaqi

Shaqaqi, 44, was the founding secretary general of Islamic Jihad in Palestine (PIJ), educated in Egypt and influenced by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna.

On 26 October 1995, he was shot by two Mossad agents in front of the Diplomat Hotel in Sliema, Malta. He was on his way back to Damascus from a meeting with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya when he was tracked down and killed. The Mossad agents fired two shots in the forehead and twice in the back of his head, killing him instantly.