Barak headed Abu Jihad assassination
Israel-Palestine, Politics, 7/4/1997

Israeli opposition leader Ehud Barak headed the command center that oversaw the assassination of the PLO's military chief in 1988, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported on July 4.

The report said that Barak, then the deputy chief of staff, coordinated the planning by the air force, navy and the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit which carried out the raid.

Khalil al-Wasir, better known as Abu Jihad, was assassinated on the night of April 15, 1988, at his home in Tunis because Israel believed he was coordinating the Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which had broken out four months before.

He was Yasser Arafat's closest aide and head of the PLO's military operations.

Israel has never accepted responsibility for the assassination, but the operation has been widely attributed to it. Barak's aides and government spokesman Moshe Fogel would not comment.

Maariv says Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier, who was elected leader of the opposition Labor Party last month, ran the operation itself from a navy missile boat cruising offshore.

Abu Jihad's widow, Intissar al-Wasir, is now welfare minister of the Palestinian Authority.

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