Fatah mourns female terrorist hijacker who died of cancer

Images and text posted on the official Fatah Facebook page

Posted text: “The Fatah Movement eulogizes fighter Theresa Halsa (i.e., terrorist and plane hijacker, involved in murder of 1)

With great sorrow and heavy grief, Fatah eulogizes fighter, released prisoner, and director of the portfolio of the wounded in the Jordanian arena Theresa Halsa ‘Um Salman.’

For those who do not know, Theresa Halsa is a Jordanian [whose father is from] Karak, and her mother is a Palestinian from Acre.

[She was] the first Arab female self-sacrificing fighter (Fida’iya), a Jordanian Christian who hijacked a planewith 140 Israeli passengers on board (sic., 90 passengers, not all of whom were Israelis).

She demanded to release Jordanian and Palestinian prisoners in 1972, when she was 17 years old.

She was arrested and released in 1983 as part of a prisoner exchange deal…

Your name will be commemorated in history in letters of light as long as we live.”

The images show Theresa Halsa at different times of her life, including one of her being sentenced following the attack and one of her lying in a hospital bed being embraced by a young girl.

Theresa Halsa – 17-year-old female Israeli Arab terrorist and a member of the Black September terror organization, a secret branch of Fatah, who participated in the hijacking of Sabena flight 571 from Vienna to Tel Aviv in May 1972. When the plane landed in Israel, the terrorists demanded the release of 315 Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons. Israel mounted a rescue operation led by Ehud Barak (who later served as Israeli Prime Minister), in which Benjamin Netanyahu (who also later served as Israeli Prime Minister) participated. During the rescue the two male hijackers, Ali Taha Abu Snina and Abed Al-Aziz Atrash, were killed, and one passenger, 22-year-old Miriam Anderson, was also killed accidentally. The two female hijackers, Rima Tannous and Theresa Halsa, were captured and sentenced to life imprisonment – Halsa for 220 years. They were released in November 1983 in a prisoner exchange. Halsa was expelled to Jordan where she lived until she died of cancer on March 28, 2020.