Between 18,000 and 20,000 Palestinians are on the payroll of various terrorist organizations operating outside Israel, according to the Israel Defense Force.
Of that number, 11,000 live in Lebanon. Al Fatah, the fighting arm of the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization, has a membership of 4,000, the IDF said.
But these units bear little resemblance to an army.
The emphasis given their organization and training in the PLO’s journal and other publications is a propaganda effort intended to boost the morale of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the IDF said.
A military source quoted by Ha’aretz on Friday took issue with a report in Jane’s Defense Weekly, the authoritative British publication, that the PLO is moving to disband its fighting units.
The source claimed that on the contrary, it is actually trying “to organize new terrorist units within a military structure, as the army of a future Palestinian state,” Ha’aretz said.
In fact, PLO chief Yasir Arafat and leaders of Al Fatah began in the early 1980s to establish institutionalized military formations in southern Lebanon and call them the Palestinian army, the source said.
According to the source, the driving force behind those efforts was Arafat’s military chief, Abu Jihad, who was organizing terrorists in Lebanon into companies, battalions and brigades.
Those efforts suffered a severe setback when Abu Jihad was assassinated at his home in Tunis on April 16, 1988, by what is widely believed to have been an Israeli hit squad.
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