Today marks the 26th anniversary of the martyrdom of Fathi Shaqaqi

Fathi Shaqaqi was martyred in 1995 during an organized military operation by the national intelligence agency of Israel (Mossad) at the age of 44 after a lifetime of struggle for the aspirations of the Palestinian people and enduring years of captivity in the zionist regime's prisons.

Fathi Shaqaqi was born to a refugee family of eight children in the slums of a refugee camp in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. His family was originally from Zarnuqa near Ramlah, where they had lived for nearly five generations and his grandfather had served as the Imam of the local mosque.

The Shaqaqi family fled Zarnuqa during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in fear of israeli massacres and were not allowed to return.

Most of his early education was at the United Nations school. He attended Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, where he studied physics and mathematics. In 1970–1974, he taught mathematics at a school for orphans in East Jerusalem. In 1974 he moved to Egypt to study medicine at Mansoura University, specializing in pediatrics. Upon receiving his medical degree in 1981, he worked as a general practitioner at Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem. He later opened a medical clinic in Gaza.

In 1981, along with Abd Al Aziz Awda and five other Palestinian Islamist and Salafi leaders, he founded the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine. The aim of the organization was the establishment of a sovereign, Islamic Palestinian state within the geographic borders of pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine.

“We are only defending our right to live in our homeland. We lived in peace with Jews for centuries. I have no problem with Jews. But I will fight the occupation,” Shaqaqi said in an interview with Robert Fisk.

In an interview with Charles Richards of The Independent in 1992, Shaqaqi stated that his aim was a Palestine from the river to the sea “where all religions can live together in one state under Islamic Quranic law.”

Shaqiqi formed a small secretive organization engaged in assassinations, mass shootings, bombings, and suicide bombings against the israeli military. Shaqaqi prohibited targeting innocent civilians, which however did not include the zionist settlers.

Shaqaqi was arrested in Gaza by israel in 1983 for publishing the magazine "Islamic Vanguard", but released the following year. He was rearrested in 1986 and sentenced to four years in prison at Ashkelon and Nafah in the Negev desert. In 1988 he was deported to Southern Lebanon, allegedly at the orders of Yitzhak Rabin.

The then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the assassination of Shaqaqi after the Hamas group's operation in the Beit Lid area that killed and injured 130 Zionists on January 25, 1995.

Fathi Shaqaqi was martyred on 26 October 1995 in front of the Diplomat Hotel in Sliema, Malta by a hit team composed of two Mossad agents. The assassination happened when he was on his way back from Tripoli after visiting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Islamic Jihad sources in Gaza confirmed that Shaqaqi had been traveling from Libya to his home in Damascus and made a stopover in Malta.

The martyrdom of Shaqaqi triggered a wave of protests among Muslim nations. People in different countries held demonstrations condemning the zionist regime's assassination of a Palestinian resistance commander and insisted on continuing his path. (ILKHA)