An expressive drawing showing the martyr Palestinian resistance fighter Kamal Adwan (social networking sites)

Kamal Adwan, a Palestinian politician and leader, born in 1935. He was a member of the first Palestinian National Council in 1964 and one of the founders of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) in 1965. He was assassinated by the Israeli Foreign Intelligence Service (Mossad) in Beirut on April 10, 1973, along with two of his Companions on his struggle.

His birth and education

Ahmed Kamal Abdel Hamid Adwan was born in 1935 in the village of Berbera, located in the southern part of the Palestinian coast on the road between Gaza and Jaffa. His family moved to live in the Gaza Strip after the 1948 war and the displacement of Palestinians from their lands. When he reached the age of 17, his father died, and his older brother, Muhammad Ali, became Breadwinner for the family.

Kamal studied primary school at Berbera School, and completed his primary studies after their displacement to Gaza at Al-Rimal School affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). He studied secondary school at Imam Al-Shafi’i School, and at that stage he met Yasser Arafat, Khalil Al-Wazir, and Riyad Al-Za’noun.

Who later co-founded the Fatah movement with him.

After graduating from high school;

He moved to Egypt to study petroleum and mineral engineering at Cairo University in 1955, but his humble financial condition was an obstacle to completing his studies, so he traveled to Saudi Arabia to work at the Aramco Corporation in Dammam.

Then he left it during the Israeli aggression on Gaza to participate in the resistance. He later returned to Saudi Arabia, after which he moved to Qatar for a year where he got to know Mahmoud Abbas and Youssef Abu Najjar. In 1968, he moved to Amman and then later to Damascus and Beirut.

In 1965, he married Maha Al-Jayousi, with whom he had a daughter, Dana, in September 1968, and a son, Rami, in April 1970. He continued his life in Beirut.

His political and struggle life

Adwan joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1952 and left it in 1954. After that, the idea of ​​armed guerrilla action crystallized in him and he founded a guerrilla cell that included 12 fighters. He participated with the group in resisting the Israeli occupation of Gaza City in 1956.

With the end of the tripartite aggression against Egypt and the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip;

The idea of ​​creating a Palestinian political front began to take shape to unify the Palestinian groups spread across the Arab countries. The Fatah movement was created as a result of that period, and it was led by Yasser Arafat and Khalil Al-Wazir in Kuwait, and Kamal Adwan in Saudi Arabia, and Adwan assumed the leadership of the organization in Qatar after moving there.

In 1964;

The first conference of the Palestinian National Council was held in May 1964, and was a result of the first Arab summit held in January of the same year. At that time, Ahmed Asaad Al-Shugairi was assigned to communicate with the Palestinian groups and Arab countries, and as a result Kamal Adwan was chosen among the members of the Council.

Kamal Adwan left Qatar for the Jordanian capital, Amman, in April 1968, after devoting himself full-time to political work in Fatah. The movement’s leadership chose him to head the information office. He established a newspaper published periodically, and established good relations with Arab and international bodies.

In September 1970, a conflict broke out between the Jordanian Armed Forces and the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat, following the attempt to assassinate King Hussein, in which the PLO was accused of involvement.

The armed clashes between the two parties (known as the events of Black September) ended with the departure of the Palestinian guerrillas to Syria and Lebanon, and among those who left was Kamal Adwan, who headed first to Syria and then to Lebanon.

On January 1, 1971, the Fatah movement held its third conference, and Kamal was elected as a member of its central committee, in addition to being assigned to supervise the western sector, which included military and field missions in the Palestinian territories, while continuing to manage the movement’s media office.

His leadership period in the western sector witnessed various guerrilla operations, as the guerrillas added to their operations under his leadership the idea of ​​explosive devices and bombings against Israeli forces.

Palestinian resistance martyr Kamal Adwan (social networking sites)

He also established a network of groups, each with a leadership that communicated directly with him, without internal communication between them, in order to avoid exposing the structure and cells of the guerrilla action in the event that one of the groups was discovered by the occupation, thus increasing the number of operations targeting Israeli settlements.

All of this coincided with Kamal Adwan’s interest in encouraging university students in Palestine to demonstrate continuously against the behavior of the occupation forces. He was also chosen to be a member of the preparatory committee for selecting members of the Palestinian People’s Conference, which was held in Cairo in March 1972.

The assassination of Kamal Adwan and his companions

On April 9, 1973, the Israeli Navy transported Israeli soldiers from the occupied Palestinian territories to the port of Beirut, via 19 rubber boats, including 21 soldiers from the General Staff Company, 34 soldiers from the Naval Special Forces, and 20 soldiers from the Paratroopers Company. Then they moved from the port in cars that took them to the points of implementation of the planned operation, which was targeting leaders of the Palestine Liberation Movement and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Beirut. In addition, Israeli soldiers arrived in Beirut via helicopters and carried out landing operations in specific places where the Palestinian resistance was based.

Ehud Barak led the Special Forces soldiers arriving in Beirut, and he had with him Sayeret Matkal, Amram Levin, and Muki Betzar as his deputy. Their goal was to reach 3 leaders of the Fatah movement and assassinate them, while another group of soldiers headed to the main headquarters of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and clashed with its fighters. Then, the Israeli soldiers booby-trapped the building and blew it up, which led to the collapse of part of it and the martyrdom of a number of members of the Front.

The next day, Ehud Barak and those with him disguised themselves in women’s clothing, which facilitated their movement in central Beirut and their arrival at the Fatah movement’s leadership headquarters. They attacked it, and this led to the martyrdom of the Commander-in-Chief of the Storm Forces, a member of the Central Committee of the Fatah movement, and the head of the Political Committee for Palestinian Affairs in Lebanon, Abu Youssef al-Najjar. .

Member of the Fatah Central Committee and its official spokesman, Kamal Nasser, was also martyred, in addition to Kamal Adwan and about 30 Palestinians members of the Fatah movement and the Democratic Front.

As a result of the assassination of leaders;

The leadership of the Liberation Organization decided to temporarily halt its activity due to the disappearance of documents from the movement’s offices in Beirut after the operation. These documents were linked to information about guerrilla groups inside the occupied territories. Twenty-one hours after the operation, the Lebanese Prime Minister at the time, Saeb Salam, submitted his resignation following the refusal of Lebanese President Suleiman Franjieh. Dismissal of a number of senior officers in the army due to their failure to monitor the Israeli attack in advance or confront it.

The Israeli media also later called the operation “Spring of Youth,” and placed it within the narrative of response to the Fatah movement’s operations in hijacking planes carrying Israelis and the “Munich operation,” which targeted the Israeli sports delegation in the German city of Munich, and which the Fatah movement planned and carried out in response to The assassination of writer Ghassan Kanafani.

A commando operation in the name of "Kamal Adwan"

On March 9, 1978, a ship set off from the Lebanese coast carrying 13 Palestinian fighters, including “Jihad,” the nom de guerre of the fighter Dalal al-Mughrabi. The group bore the name “Deir Yassin Division.” They then boarded rubber boats in which they remained at sea for two days due to strong winds. Bad weather conditions later brought them to the beach next to the “Maagan Michael” settlement, which is located 25 kilometers south of Haifa.

On the road between Tel Aviv and Haifa, on March 11;

A bus carrying Israelis was heading to Tel Aviv. The guerrillas kidnapped it and clashed with a group of the Israeli army, which led to the killing of everyone on the bus and two Israeli soldiers and the martyrdom of 9 resistance fighters, including Dalal.

In this operation, Israel also captured the guerrillas Mahmoud Fayyad and Khaled Abu Osbaa, who remained in Israeli prisons until 1985 and were released after an exchange deal between the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Israeli government. The operation was called “Kamal Adwan” in response to his assassination, and its result was that the Israeli army launched A military operation in southern Lebanon in the same month.

Source: websites