ExecutedToday.com

On this date last year, in the midst of Israel’s bloody incursion, Gaza’s Hamas government executed Palestinian journalist and human rights activist Haidar Ghanem as an Israeli spy.

Ghanem was the best-publicized of a number of Israeli collaborators to suffer that fate during the one-sided, three-week war.

“He was taken to an abandoned building in southern Gaza and shot to death,” a Palestinian source said. “Others were executed the same way.”

The Rafah resident had actually been a minor cause celebre back in 2002, when the Palestinian Authority condemned him to death for pinpointing Fatah activists for assassination by Israeli security, for which assignment he was supposedly recruited in the 1990’s while working as a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. International pressure got him released.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Ghanem confessed (as he had in the 2002 case) to the charges.

Also On This Date

• 1898: Theodore Durrant, the Demon of the Belfry
• 2007: 23 Shia hostages

On this date in 1976, three Abu Nidal terrorists were hanged before the Hotel Semiramis in Damascus, barely 24 hours after they had entered it and taken 90 hostages in a bid to win release of Palestinian prisoners.

Palestinians Muhammad al-Barqawi and Mouatassem Jayyoushi and Iraqi Jabbar Darwish suffered Syria’s first public execution since an accused Israeli spy more than a decade before — and as the late Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad had pledged, justice was swift and ruthless.

The security of the citizen is sacred. We shall not be soft in this matter. We shall hit back very hard and we denounce this criminal action committed by the gang, which acted as if it was in Israel.

They were the surviving 75% of a quartet of gunmen who early the previous morning had seized the hotel, barricaded themselves on the fifth floor, and attempted to make their trade. Plainly, it didn’t quite work out; the attempt precipitated a battle with Syrian troops which saw the fourth terrorist killed, along with four of the hostages. The Supreme State Security Court condemned the captured men to death overnight; the sentence was carried out between 6:00 and 6:30 the next morning.

New York Times coverage of the raid and the execution is unfortunately behind the paper’s paid-login firewall, but a photo of the execution shows onlookers ringing a single wooden frame for what must have been a short-drop hanging. An unused fourth noose, possibly symbolically present for the killed fourth terrorist (or possibly not; there’s no explicit comment on it), hangs beside the dead men.

So why the grievance? That June — “Black June,” to the Palestinians — Syria had bailed on hard-line Palestinians and entered the Lebanese Civil War on the side of Phalangist Christians,* just as they were on the verge of being overrun. It was the second time in six years that a neighboring Arab power had turned its guns on Palestinians. (In 1970, Jordan had expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization in “Black September.” Lots of black in the Palestinian annals.)

And why the Iraqi, among the hanged?

Palestinian terrormeister Abu Nidal had hung out his shingle in Iraq, then under the control of a rising young dictator destined for the gallows himself, but who grasped the opportunist potential of backing the Palestinian cause while states like Jordan and Syria visibly sold it out. Television crews had a few words in edgewise with the doomed men the evening before their hanging, and they claimed to have trained for their abortive mission in Iraq.

* This put Damascus on the same side as Israel.

Part of the Themed Set: Semiramis.

Also On This Date

• 1996: Dr. Mohammad Najibullah