Nayla Razzouk Agence France Presse
Munem Abul-Muna nearly fell out of his chair. He had just found out that the blonde woman who tried to kill him and his family 26 years ago was in fact a man and not just any man - but the new prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak.
"I'm in a state of shock and still cannot believe it," said Abul-Muna, 60. But whether he believes it or not, the fact is that he was a collateral casualty, the chance victim of an Israeli commando raid in Beirut, on the night of April 9, 1973. The raid was headed by the young Barak, disguised as a woman in a blonde wig.
"I can still feel the shrapnel from the bullets. But until now I did not know that it was Barak who tried to kill me and my family," said Abul-Muna, proudly displaying the small black marks on his right shoulder.
Abul-Muna, was of course, not the Israelis' target. Barak and his men were after three top leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It was just bad luck that Abul-Muna happened to be sleeping in a small ground floor room with his wife and two small children in one of the buildings struck by the Israelis.
"I jumped up in terror and looked through the window, what I thought was a blond woman entered the room with a machine-gun," he said.
"I dived under the bed with my son while my wife covered our daughter with her body on the other bed," he added.
Um Fadi, his wife, interrupted him to add that more than 40 bullets were later recovered in the room while the elevator on the other side of the wall was completely destroyed.
The operation, dubbed the "hippy" raid by Western media because of the commando's disguise, was one of Barak's most sensational operations in a string of military feats.
For the Palestinians - who had established their power base in Lebanon after being forced out of Jordan as a result of the bloody Black September incidents in 1970 - Barak's operation was a serious blow.
His squad burst into three apartments in the fashionable Verdun neighborhood, shooting dead three key Palestinian officials, Mohammed Youssef Najjar, the number two man in Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, Kamal Adwan, the director of Fatah underground activities in Israel and the occupied territories, and chief PLO spokesman Kamal Nasser.
The operation also seriously destabilized Lebanon, as then Prime Minister Saeb Salam resigned a few days later in protest over the Lebanese Army's failure to prevent the attack. The other casualties in the Verdun operation included Najjar's wife, who was mown down after trying to cover her husband with her body, two Lebanese policemen, a guard and a 70-year Italian woman.
"If Barak makes peace with us as he promised when he was elected and if he comes to Beirut, I will surely take my revenge," he said, meaningfully sliding his finger across his throat.
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