Editing Abu Nidal (section)

== Early life ==

=== 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.

=== 1948 Palestine War ===
On 29 November 1947, the United Nations resolved to partition Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state. Fighting broke out immediately, and the disruption of the citrus-fruit business hit the family's income. In Jaffa there were food shortages, truck bombs and an Irgun militia mortar bombardment. Melman writes that the al-Banna family had had good relations with the Jewish community. Abu Nidal's brother told Melman that their father had been a friend of Avraham Shapira, a founder of the Jewish defense organization, Hashomer: "He would visit [Shapira] in his home in Petah Tikva, or Shapira riding his horse would visit our home in Jaffa. I also remember how we visited Dr. Weizmann [later first president of Israel] in his home in Rehovot." But it was war, and the relationships did not help them.

Just before Israeli troops took Jaffa in April 1948, the family fled to their house near Majdal, but Israeli troops arrived there too, and the family fled again. This time they went to the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, then under Egyptian control. Melman writes that the family spent nine months living in tents, depending on UNRWA for an allowance of oil, rice and potatoes. The experience had later a powerful effect on Abu Nidal.

=== Move to Nablus and Saudi Arabia ===
The al-Banna family's commercial experience, and the money they had managed to take with them, meant they could set themselves up in business again, Melman writes. Their orange groves had gone, now part of the new state of Israel. The family moved to Nablus in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control. In 1955, Abu Nidal graduated from high school, joined the Arab nationalist [[Ba'ath Party]], and began a degree course in engineering at Cairo University, but he left after two years without a degree. In 1960, he made his way to Saudi Arabia, where he set himself up as a painter and electrician, and worked as a casual laborer for Aramco. His brother told Melman that Abu Nidal would return to Nablus from Saudi Arabia every year to visit his mother. It was during one of those visits in 1962 that he met his wife, whose family had also fled from Jaffa. The marriage produced a son and two daughters.

=== Personality ===
Abu Nidal was often in poor health, according to Seale, and tended to dress in zip-up jackets and old trousers, drinking whisky every night in his later years. He became, writes Seale, a "master of disguises and subterfuge, trusting no one, lonely and self-protective, [living] like a mole, hidden away from public view". Acquaintances said that he was capable of hard work and had a good financial brain. Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), the deputy chief of Fatah who was assassinated by the ANO in 1991, knew him well in the late 1960s when he took Abu Nidal under his wing. He told Seale:

Seale suggests that Abu Nidal's childhood explained his personality, described as chaotic by Abu Iyad and as psychopathic by Issam Sartawi, the late Palestinian heart surgeon.<sup>[33][14]</sup> His siblings' scorn, the loss of his father, and his mother's removal from the family home when he was seven, then the loss of his home and status in the conflict with Israel, created a mental world of plots and counterplots, reflected in his tyrannical leadership of the ANO. Members' wives (it was an all-male group) were not allowed to befriend each another, and Abu Nidal's wife was expected to live in isolation without friends.<sup>[34]</sup>