Tunisians remember the Israeli strike that bound their fate with Palestinians 40 years ago

Audio By Carbonatix

HAMMAM CHOTT, Tunisia (AP) — Jamel Bahrini remembers the smell of dust and blood that clung to the air when he arrived at the scene of the strike in Tunisia 's capital 40 years ago, among hundreds of other first responders.

Israeli warplanes had just struck the Palestine Liberation Organization’s headquarters outside Tunis, killing dozens of people in Israel's longest-range airstrike at that time.

Neighbors and families rushed into the streets, digging through rubble with their bare hands, searching for survivors.

“On that tree, I found half the body of a martyr, still hanging and his blood still flowing,” Bahrini, now 62, told The Associated Press as he walked through part of the now abandoned bomb site on Wednesday.

Bahrini was among the Tunisians at a recent commemoration ceremony who said the attack looms large in their memories. Mourners carried posters that read “From the sea of Tunisia to the sea of Gaza" and talked about the 1985 strike in the context of today's war.

The strike still shapes Tunisian perceptions of Israel and serves as a touchstone connecting them to Palestinians in the two-year war in Gaza.

“We are not merely a people showcasing solidarity, but we share a common cause,” Bahrini said.

In the early hours of Oct. 1, 1985, between six to eight F-15 fighter jets — accompanied by two Boeing-707 aircrafts which were used as aerial refueling tankers — flew more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) to carry out one of the most distant air raids Israel had conducted to that date, according to Israel’s military archive.

To reach the site of the attack in the town of Hammam Chott, Israeli jets required multiple in-air refueling and careful route planning to avoid detection by radar over friendly territories. The operation took 10 minutes and used 1,000-pound bombs to precisely target the seaside buildings that were believed to house PLO leadership, communications and military facilities.

The attack killed 68 people, including 50 Palestinians and 18 Tunisians and wounded over 100 people, according to Tunisian government figures provided to the United Nations at the time.

Many Israelis remember the time period as one of intense fighting between its forces and the PLO before it laid down its arms in the 1990s. They see distant Tunisia as a side note in a decades-long conflict. But in Hammam Chott, Tunisians see the attack as a turning point, when their ties to the Palestinian struggle became deeply personal.

Israel — which later named the operation “Operation Wooden Leg” — said that the Hammam Chott attack was an act of self-defense, carried out in retaliation for the killing of three Israelis aboard a yacht in Cyprus in September of the same year. They blamed the PLO, an allegation that Palestinian leadership at the time denied.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who narrowly escaped the attack, denounced it at the time as a “cowardly massacre.”

Tunisia, which had hosted the exiled PLO since its forced departure from Beirut in 1982 during the Lebanese civil war, called it a violation of its sovereignty and demanded international accountability.

Days later, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning the strike as a breach of international law and ruled that Tunisia had the right to receive “appropriate reparations as a result of the loss of human life and material damage.” Even the United States, an ally of both Tunisia and Israel at the time, didn’t veto the resolution.

Taher Sheikh, the Tunis bureau chief for the Palestinian News Agency WAFA, remembers seeing Arafat standing atop the rubble, dispelling questions about whether the strike had killed him.

He said it remains a mystery whether his survival was mere luck or thanks to a tip from foreign intelligence. Arafat died in a French military hospital in November 2004 at the age of 75, after falling ill under circumstances that have been questioned by Palestinians.

“Arafat had just returned to Tunis, but instead of heading back to Hammam Chott, the Palestinian ambassador asked him to go to La Marsa, another suburb north of Tunis, to meet a guest,” he said. The detour likely saved his life.

In Tunisia and across North Africa, the current Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has deepened that solidarity as anger toward Israel mounts, protests draw thousands and boycotts gain traction.

The lingering memory of the 1985 strike still echoes, raising questions about the long-term impact of Israel’s strategies today, including last month’s strike in Doha, which targeted senior Hamas officials who are in the Qatari capital for negotiations. Tunisians were also alarmed by aerial strikes on boats belonging to an international activist flotilla at Tunisia's port of Sidi Bou Said last month as they were preparing to sail to Gaza.

Organizers of the Global Sumud Flotilla — which carried a symbolic amount of humanitarian aid seeking to deliver it to the Gaza Strip — accused Israel of striking their vessels. Israeli officials last week declined to comment on their claims, although U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack mentioned Tunisia among the countries Israel had struck in an interview earlier this month.

“Despite what is happening in Gaza, the entire Tunisian population has embraced the resistance and will continue to embrace it in their veins until the liberation of all of Palestine," Bahrini, the first responder, said.

By Thursday, the Israeli navy had intercepted the flotilla boats as they approached the coastal Palestinian territory and detained the activists for deportation to their home countries.

___

Find more of AP’s Israel-Hamas coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war