Ahmed Sa'adat (born 1953) was the Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine from 3 October 2001, succeeding Abu Ali Mustafa.
Biography[]
Ahmed Sa'adat was born in 1953 in al-Bireh, West Bank to a Sunni Muslim family. He was a Marxist-Leninist and believed that the only solution would be Israel ceasing to exist and Palestine being one state. On 3 October 2001 he succeeded Abu Ali Mustafa as Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) after his assassination, and on 17 October 2001 the Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades assassinated Minister for Tourism Rehavam Zeevi in revenge. He took refuge in Yasser Arafat's headquarters at Muqata'a, where Arafat kept him safe from Israel. Israel agreed to give up the siege in exchange for Sa'adat being jailed in Jericho under United States and United Kingdom supervision. He could not run for political office, give interviews, or address the public, and Amnesty International declared his imprisonment illegal, although the Palestinian National Authority refused to hand him over. On 14 March 2006, as US and British guards left the prison, Israel launched Operation Bringing Home the Goods, capturing him. They killed 2 prisoners and wounded 28 when they tried to resist, and captured several of them.
Sa'adat was kept in Israeli prisons, and on 27 September 2011 he began a hunger strike to protest Israeli solitary confinement and prison policies, although 1,000 Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for Gilad Shalit, overshadowing the hunger strike. After 21 days, on 17 October 2011, the hunger strike ended, as Israel agreed to end their policy of solitary confinement.