The Sunday Star-Bulletin & Advertiser · Honolulu, Hawaii · 9 July 1972

CP-1972-011

bomb in car kills Kanafani

Popular Front spokesman

Jim Hoagland, Washington Post Service, Beirut

Transcribed from the clipping

“BEIRUT — Ghassan Kanafani, 26-year-old Palestinian revolutionary and spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the most violently inclined radical organizations in the world, gently reproved a friend last week who expressed concern over Kanafani’s safety. ‘I am determined not to be assassinated,’ Kanafani said. But he continued to move about Beirut without any special security precautions, despite speculation that reprisals might be taken against officials of his group for the killing of 26 persons May 30 at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport. KANAFANI’S reassuring words were erased yesterday by a bomb blast that instantly killed the quiet intellectual. The bomb exploded at about 10:30 a.m. when Kanafani turned on the ignition of his small, British-made automobile outside his home in the Beirut suburb of Hazmiya. Kanafani’s 19-year-old niece, Lamis Najem, a passenger in the car, was also killed. Lebanese police said they were investigating the blast. Kanafani’s revolutionary colleagues in the PFLP immediately issued a statement that asserted that ‘the imperialist Zionist camp’ was behind the assassination, whoever may have actually planted the bomb… LOCAL SECURITY officials would not rule out the possibility that Kanafani’s murder may have been connected with internal antagonisms and competition within the Palestinian movement, although they stressed that there was no evidence of this immediately available.… Some Palestinians blame the Popular Front for provoking the clashes between the guerrillas and the Jordanian army that resulted in the guerrillas being expelled from Jordan after heavy Palestinian losses last year. The Popular Front’s spectacular airliner hijackings and its political consistency had been winning increasing support among young Palestinians, however, and producing a more radical movement within Al Fatah… Sitting in his office at Al Hadaf, a weekly news opinion magazine he published and edited, Kanafani two weeks ago defended the attack on Lod as necessary to the PFLP. He dismissed criticism from the West and from among some moderate Palestinians as an ‘unscientific, unmoral reaction that condemns only us and ignores other tragedies, especially those committed by Israel.’”

Photograph caption

“Only rubble remains of car in which Kanafani died.” · UPI Photo

Context added by this archive

The eighth American printing of this killing held here and the fullest, filed by a Washington Post correspondent in Beirut. It is also the one that complicates him most: two weeks before he died he sat in his own magazine office and defended the Lod airport attack, in which twenty-six people were killed, and dismissed criticism of it. The clipping stays whole for that reason. It carries one line nobody else has — a friend worried about his safety the week before, and Kanafani answering, I am determined not to be assassinated. The phrase this reporter reaches for is the quiet intellectual. Across the eight printings the archive holds, his age is given as 34, 36 and here 26, and his niece’s as 14, 15 and here 19.

Cite this item

"bomb in car kills Kanafani," The Sunday Star-Bulletin & Advertiser, 9 July 1972. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1972-011. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1972-011

Elsewhere in the archive

• Artist Seeking Mideast TogethernessThe Daily Progress · 3 May 1972 · the same year
• Arab Militant Leader Dies In Car ExplosionJacksonville Journal · 8 July 1972 · the same year
• Israel Accused in Assassination BlastThe Flint Journal · 9 July 1972 · the same year