Editing Abu Nidal (section)

=== Family, early education ===
Abu Nidal was born in Jaffa, where he was raised in a large stone house near the beach.

Sabri Khalil al-Banna was born in May 1937 in Jaffa, on the Mediterranean coast of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His father, Hajj Khalil al-Banna, owned 6,000 acres (24 km<sup>2</sup>) of orange groves situated between Jaffa and Majdal, today Ashkelon in Israel. The family lived in luxury in a three-storey stone house near the beach, later used as an Israeli military court. Muhammad Khalil al-Banna, Abu Nidal's brother, told Yossi Melman:

"The kibbutz named Ramat Hakovesh has to this day a tract of land known as 'the al-Banna orchard'. ...My brothers and I still preserve the documents showing our ownership of the property, even though we know full well that we and our children have no chance of getting it back".

Khalil al-Banna's wealth allowed him to take several wives. According to Sabri in an interview with ''Der Spiegel'', his father had 13 wives, 17 sons and eight daughters. Melman writes that Sabri's mother was the eighth wife. She had been one of the family's maids, a 16-year-old Alawite girl. The family disapproved of the marriage, according to Patrick Seale, and as a result Sabri, Khalil's 12th child, was apparently looked down on by his older siblings, although in later life the relationships were repaired.

In 1944 or 1945, his father sent him to Collège des Frères de Jaffa, a French mission school, which he attended for one year. When his father died in 1945, when Sabri was seven years old, the family turned his mother out of the house. His brothers took him out of the mission school and enrolled him instead in a prestigious, private Muslim school in Jerusalem, now known as Umariya Elementary School, which he attended for about two years.