Bassam Abu Sharif

Bassam Abu Sharif (Arabic: بسام أبو شريف‎‎; born 1946) is a former senior adviser to Yasser Arafat and leading cadre of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He was previously a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

A Marxist and an admirer of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, Abu Sharif, then a member of the PFLP, was dubbed the "face of terror" by Time Magazine for his role in the Dawson's Field hijackings in 1970, when the PFLP hijacked Pan Am, Swissair, and TWA flights — a fourth pair of hijackers on an El Al flight were overpowered by security guards and passengers — and blew them up in the Jordanian desert, triggering King Hussein's expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, which became known as Black September.

Abu Sharif organized, and participated in, many actions against Israel. He lost four fingers, and was left deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, when a bomb exploded in his hands in Beirut, Lebanon in 1972. The assassination attempt was carried out by Mossad who hid the explosives in the book The Memoirs of Che Guevara, and sent the book to Sharif.

Within PFLP, he gradually began to favor a reduced emphasis on armed struggle and closer cooperation with Fatah, the dominant PLO faction. As a result, he was removed from the PFLP Politburo in 1981, and was appointed to run external relations. In drawing closer to Fatah leader Yasser Arafat and meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, he was expelled from the PFLP in 1987.

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