Arab nationalist planned hijackings

For millions of young Arabs, Habash represented the voice that said no to Western intervention in the Middle East and to the Arab regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, that had allowed U.S. interests to dominate the region. He saw the Palestinian cause as part of a global struggle, and defended international terrorism as a way of drawing attention to it.

The son of a Greek Orthodox wheat merchant, Habash reportedly believed that he was prevented from assuming control of the PLO because he was not a Muslim. He was born in 1925 in the village of Lydda, now Lod, the site of Israel's Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv.

The village fell to Israeli control after a fierce bombardment in 1948, and Habash fled to Lebanon after being seized and beaten by Israeli soldiers.

He studied medicine at the American University of Beirut, founding a series of radical student organizations that called for unifying the Arabs' military might to annihilate Israel.

After Israeli forces crushed an Arab assault and moved into the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and Syria's Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East War, Habash formed the PFLP to continue operations against Israelis. It became the second-largest faction within the PLO, after Arafat's Fatah organization.

In one of its first operations, an Israeli El Al airliner was hijacked to Algiers in July 1968, forcing the Israelis to free 16 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of the plane and its passengers.

Two years later, PFLP guerrillas hijacked four airliners in September 1970, blowing up an American Boeing 747 at Cairo International Airport and holding about 500 passengers from the other three aircraft hostage in Jordan.

"When we hijack a plane, it has more effect than if we killed a hundred Israelis in battle," Habash once said. "For decades, world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world's talking about us now."

The hijackings prompted Jordan's King Hussein to expel the Palestinians. Habash publicly renounced hijackings in the early 1970s.

But the terror did not stop. In May 1972, the PFLP used Japanese Red Army guerrillas to conduct a machine-gun attack on the Tel Aviv airport's terminal building, resulting in the deaths of 27 civilians. Two years later, PFLP operatives threw hand grenades into a Tel Aviv theater, killing three and injuring 54.