Word: habash
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Evidently, the Israelis had hoped to bag Dr. George Habash and three aides in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whom Israeli intelligence believed were on the flight. They were not. After carefully interrogating everyone aboard, the Israelis allowed them to reboard, and the Caravelle returned to Beirut less than three hours after taking off. Among the passengers were the Iraqi Planning Minister and an Iraqi ambassador, who were treated with proper diplomatic deference...
...Palestinians suspect that the raid had been designed to kill or kidnap Habash and other P.F.L.P. leaders. For once, Israeli intelligence was at fault; unbeknownst to the spies, the scheduled strategy meeting at the camps had been postponed. Rather than return emptyhanded, the raiding party blew up suspected fedayeen installations before they went home...
Palestinian guerrilla leaders are as edgy as anyone. When George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, recently entered Beirut's American University Hospital for treatment of a heart condition, a squad of bodyguards donned hospital white and took up positions near his bed. "All we're trying to do," says a Palestinian fighter who has had one colleague blown up when he started his car and another maimed by an explosive package, "is postpone our own execution...
Yasser Arafat, head of the overall Palestine Liberation Organization, stayed away for security reasons; P.F.L.P. Boss George Habash, who suffers from a heart condition, was forced to watch from an apartment balcony as the cortege passed. But representatives of all the guerrilla groups in Lebanon and Syria were on hand. A slow-stepping 24-piece commando band in camouflage uniforms wailed Chopin's Funeral March. Thousands of Palestinian refugees, in a half-mile-long procession, trailed the flower-smothered coffin and its gun-bearing honor guard to the fedayeen's "cemetery of martyrs...
...Habash is shrewdly sensitive to popular opinion. Thus, because the P.F.L.P. has been widely censured for blowing up commercial jets, Habash indicated that hijackings will cease. "We are not a terrorist party," he said. "We are revolutionaries. We will not practice terror but revolutionary violence, taking as targets things that the common man will understand." Last week, as if to underscore his point, a section of the 1,068-mile Tapline, which carries Saudi Arabian oil to the Mediterranean, was mysteriously blown...