--- category: "Country" tags: - Country - Palestine - Mossad - PLO - BlackSeptember - Israel summary: "Palestine is the name used for the territory comprising the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem claimed for an independent Palestinian state; Palestinian organizations including the PLO, Black September, and PFLP figure extensively in the vault's Mossad operations and Israeli intelligence subjects, as do the CIA's relations with Palestinian intelligence." created: 2026-05-14 updated: 2026-05-17 location: "Ramallah / Gaza City" --- Palestine refers to the territory claimed by the Palestinian people as the basis for an independent state, comprising the [[West Bank]] (including East [[Jerusalem]]) and the [[Gaza Strip]]. The question of Palestinian statehood derives from the British Mandate period (1920-1948) and the 1948 establishment of the [[State of Israel]], which displaced approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs in what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe). The West Bank was held by [[Jordan]] from 1948 to 1967 and occupied by [[Israel]] following the [[Six-Day War]]; the Gaza Strip was held by [[Egypt]] and similarly occupied by Israel in 1967.[^1] ### PLO and Palestinian Organizations The [[Palestine Liberation Organization]] (PLO) was founded in 1964 as an umbrella organization for Palestinian political and military factions. Under [[Yasser Arafat]]'s leadership following the 1967 war, the PLO's Fatah movement became dominant. The PLO established itself in Jordan, conducting cross-border operations against Israel, until it was expelled following [[Black September]] 1970 - when King Hussein crushed PLO forces in Jordan. The PLO relocated to [[Lebanon]], from which it conducted operations until Israel's 1982 invasion forced its departure to Tunis. Palestinian factions active in the period covered by this vault include: - [[Fatah]] - Arafat's mainstream nationalist faction - Black September - a PLO-affiliated clandestine unit responsible for the [[Munich massacre]] of September 5-6, 1972 - [[PFLP]] (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) - Marxist faction that conducted hijackings including the 1976 [[Entebbe hijacking|Entebbe]] operation - [[Abu Nidal Organization]] - breakaway faction that conducted attacks in multiple countries, allegedly with connections to [[Iraq]] and [[Libya]] ### Mossad Operations [[Mossad]]'s response to the 1972 Munich massacre - in which Black September killed eleven Israeli athletes - was [[Operation Wrath of God]], a long-running assassination program targeting those responsible. Mossad teams tracked and killed multiple PLO operatives across [[Europe]] and the [[Middle East]] over the following years. The operation was dramatized in Steven Spielberg's 2005 film *Munich* and documented in George Jonas's *Vengeance* (1984). A mistaken assassination in Lillehammer, Norway in 1973 - in which Mossad killed a Moroccan waiter believing him to be a PLO operative - led to arrests of Mossad officers by Norwegian police.[^2] Palestinian intelligence organizations - including Force 17 and the PLO's intelligence branch under Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf) - maintained connections with Arab intelligence services and, through back-channels, with Western intelligence agencies seeking information on Palestinian operations. The CIA maintained contacts with PLO representatives despite the U.S. government's official refusal to deal with the organization. ### PA and Oslo The 1993 [[Oslo Accords]] between Israel and the PLO established the [[Palestinian Authority]] (PA), which assumed limited self-governance authority in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. The PA's intelligence apparatus, the [[Preventive Security Service]] (Amn al-Wiqaiya), maintained security cooperation with both the CIA and Israeli [[Shin Bet]] from the Oslo period onward as part of coordinated counterterrorism programs targeting Islamist factions.[^1] ### Footnotes [^1]: "Palestine," *Encyclopaedia Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine [^2]: Jonas, George. *Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.* Simon & Schuster, 1984.