هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
On the morning of 7 October 2023, as rockets filled the skies over the Israeli communities surrounding Gaza, Qassam Brigades fighters appeared above the fence in gliders, flying low towards Israeli military positions and settlements. The sight became one of the defining images of the day, when thousands of Palestinian fighters crossed into the occupied territories. Within days, supporters of Palestine were reproducing the image of a fighter suspended beneath a wing on walls and placards in cities around the world.
The simple gliders showed how Palestinian fighters, driven by determination and a dream, could breach one of the world’s most complex security and technological systems. They also reflected a long history of attempts to fly over Palestine using different tools and methods.
In the summer of 1969, Leila Khaled insisted that the plane she had hijacked fly over Haifa, the city where she was born and from which she had been displaced as a child, so she could see her homeland from the air. Eighteen years later, fighters crossed from southern Lebanon into occupied Palestine in the Qibya martyrs operation, commemorated in the song “The Ya’soub Flew”. The Syrian and Tunisian martyrs, alongside their Palestinian comrades, represented the wider Arab homeland.
The idea later reached Gaza. Since the Israeli occupation’s withdrawal from the Strip in 2005, resistance fighters have continued to seek a route to their occupied lands that would take them over walls and borders.
Early attempts in the 1980s
Gliders have been used in combat at several points in military history. In May 1940, German paratroopers landed in gliders on the roof of Belgium’s Eben Emael fortress and captured it within hours. In 1943, similar aircraft landed on Italy’s Gran Sasso to free Mussolini from prison. A year later, British forces used gliders at Pegasus Bridge to open the way to Normandy.
Those large aircraft belonged to state armies. Towed by bombers, they carried entire units. The use of a light wing to carry a single fighter across a border was almost unknown among liberation movements. Palestinian factions pioneered it.
Their attempts began in the early 1980s. Electronic fences ran along the northern border of occupied Palestine, while crossings by land and sea from southern Lebanon were becoming more difficult each year.
On the morning of 7 March 1981, two fedayeen from the Palestine Liberation Front, led by Abu Abbas, set off in single-seat motorised hang gliders, each fitted with a small engine. One landed near Rosh Hanikra. The other landed at dawn in the western Galilee near Kibbutz Afik, took an Israeli settler hostage and moved from place to place for hours. He eventually reached the village of Tamra, where he entered a house. The operation ended with one fighter arrested and the other killed.
According to an Israeli account attributed to one of the fighters, the mission was to capture Israeli settlers or soldiers and exchange them for prisoners held in the occupation’s prisons. The Front claimed responsibility that day through the Palestine Liberation Organization’s radio station in Lebanon. Its sources said that “Israel” had concealed the operation’s results and details. The aircraft could travel at between 60 and 90 kilometres per hour.
The following day, “Israel” raised the incident at the Security Council. Its representative described the attempt to fly into occupied Palestine as a new development with dangerous implications. The account also describes Israeli authorities later presenting two captives to journalists. The captives said they had trained on hang gliders in Syria under Syrian instructors.
Just five weeks later, on 16 April 1981, the Front tried a different aerial route. Two fedayeen flew towards the border in a hot-air balloon, but Israeli occupation soldiers shot it down near Kibbutz Manara. Both fighters were killed in a brief clash on the ground.
Despite their limited results, these attempts suggest that the search for a route through the air went beyond isolated initiatives. The idea was taking hold within Palestinian factions, awaiting an operation that would shake the Israeli military establishment.
The Night of the Hang Gliders
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command named its mission “The Qibya Martyrs Operation,” recalling the massacre carried out by an Israeli unit in the Palestinian village in 1953. It selected four fedayeen, including two from outside Palestine.
One was Khaled Akar, from Aleppo, who had joined the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon at the age of 14 and trained in the Front’s camps in Naameh, in southern Lebanon. The other was Miloud Ben Najeh Nouma, a Tunisian whose pan-Arab convictions had drawn him to the Front and who had trained in Syria. The group also included two Palestinian fedayeen whose aircraft were forced to land inside Lebanon because of technical problems.
On the night of 25 November 1987, the aircraft took off from the hills of southern Lebanon. Their red and white wings were fitted with engines no larger than lawnmower motors and small propellers. Each fighter carried a Kalashnikov rifle, a silenced pistol and several hand grenades.
At about 10.30pm, Israeli soldiers heard the engines. Flares were fired and helicopters equipped with searchlights were sent out, but they returned without finding the aircraft, which were flying at treetop level.
One of the two aircraft crashed in the “security zone” occupied by Israel in southern Lebanon, a few hundred metres from the border. Israeli forces tracked down and killed its pilot. The other landed in a field of thorn bushes near Gibor camp, east of Kiryat Shmona, where the Nahal Brigade had its headquarters.
The fighter opened fire on a passing military vehicle, killing the officer at the wheel and wounding a female conscript. He then advanced towards the camp, firing and throwing grenades. The guard fled from the gate, allowing him to reach the tents, where he killed five soldiers and wounded others before a wounded soldier shot him dead.
Six Israeli soldiers were killed that night, the army’s highest death toll in an attack inside occupied Palestine in almost a decade. Hebrew newspapers described the attack in their headlines as a disastrous failure in the north and a blow to the army.
The defence minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, acknowledged before the Knesset that the required procedures had not been followed at the camp. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir blamed Syria, while Deputy Chief of Staff Ehud Barak vowed to make the Palestinian organisations pay the price. The guard was initially the only person put on trial, charged with cowardice. Israelis coined the term “the guard syndrome” to describe an institution that blames its lowest-ranking member for its failures.
The Palestine Liberation Organization leadership praised the operation, saying it showed that barriers could not stop a fedayeen fighter determined to die a martyr. Young men in Gaza wrote “6:1” on walls and chanted it in soldiers’ faces. Less than two weeks later, the Stone Intifada, also known as the First Intifada, erupted in the Strip. Many historians regard the Night of the Hang Gliders as one of its catalysts.
The occupation withheld Miloud’s body until the summer of 2008, when it was returned to Tunisia as part of the prisoner exchange between “Israel” and Hezbollah. The attack also remained prominent in Israeli military memory: the occupation routinely targeted General Command sites on its anniversary. Most notably, in December 1988, an Israeli unit raided the General Command headquarters in Naameh. Known in Israel as the raid “Blue and Brown,” the operation marked the first anniversary of the hang glider attack.
Early attempts in Gaza
After the Israeli occupation withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the enclave was surrounded by a fence monitored by cameras and watchtowers. Reaching the occupied territories required new means of crossing. Resistance leaders in Gaza were debating how to overcome Israeli obstacles to carry out martyrdom operations. In Rafah, one of those working on the problem was a teacher by day and an engineer by night.
Awad al-Qeeq was born in 1975 in Jabalia refugee camp to a family displaced from the village of Iraq Suwaydan. He later settled in Rafah refugee camp. He studied chemistry and physics, graduated with honours and worked in education, eventually becoming the headteacher of a middle school. He was also a leading rocket engineer in Saraya al-Quds, heading its engineering and manufacturing unit.
According to his biography published by Saraya al-Quds, he and fellow engineers began working in 2007 to develop an air arm for the resistance. They designed a prototype hang glider and prepared studies on manufacturing drones. The project was never completed: an Israeli helicopter assassinated al-Qeeq and his companion Osama al-Houbi in Rafah on 30 April 2008. The Brigades later described the drone “Jenin,” unveiled 14 years later, as the result of the work he had begun.
Years later, Israeli accounts described another project, closer in spirit to the 1987 attack. During the summer 2014 war, the Shin Bet announced that it had arrested a cell commander from the Qassam Brigades’ elite unit in Khan Younis.
Hebrew-language media, citing an account attributed to the detainee, reported that Qassam commander Raed al-Attar had established a small paragliding unit around 2010. The reports said al-Attar and an aide sent its members through tunnels to Sinai, then on to Cairo. From there, they flew to Malaysia, where they trained for a week on motorised paragliders. The same account said they later trained in Khan Younis and Rafah to cross the border by air and attack a military site or a nearby settlement.
Israel assassinated al-Attar, commander of the Qassam Brigades’ Rafah Brigade, in Rafah on 21 August 2014, along with Mohammed Abu Shamala, a member of the Brigades’ military council, and commander Mohammed Barhoum. The assassinations followed the capture of Israeli army officer Hadar Goldin by fighters from the brigade. Discussing the paragliding project, a Shin Bet official said al-Attar’s assassination had thrown the entire project into disarray.
This remains an exclusively Israeli account, presented as based on a prisoner’s confessions extracted during interrogation. Malaysia officially denied allowing Hamas members to train on its territory, and the Qassam Brigades did not acknowledge the unit’s existence at the time.
The account and the wider record nevertheless show that the idea of crossing by air had been present since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Fighters continued to look towards the rest of their stolen homeland. Eighteen years later, they put the idea into practice, settling the debate over whether it was realistic and feasible.
Saqr Squadron and 7 October
In July 2023, several drivers stopped on the coastal road near al-Zawayda in central Gaza and took out their phones to film a man flying over the beach beneath a broad, colourful paraglider. It was an unusual sight for Gaza’s residents. Paragliding is banned in Gaza, and gliders brought through the crossings are confiscated.
The man was later identified as the European Union’s ambassador to the Palestinians, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff. The incident angered Israel’s foreign ministry and astonished Gazans, who wondered how he had brought in his equipment. No one on the beach knew that other gliders had already been flying over the enclave for some time, their operators preparing for another day.
Three months later, in the early hours of 7 October, the Qassam Brigades released a video of fighters practising take-offs and landings in gliders. It was the first public unveiling of the “Saqr Squadron”.
The attack involved two-seat gliders, controlled by the person in the rear while an armed fighter in front prepared to land and storm the target. Fighters also used single-seat gliders, carrying the motor on their backs. Some crossed the fence under cover of rocket barrages. The short distance left surveillance systems no time to respond. Jane’s, the specialist military magazine, described the attack as the world’s first known military use of this type of aircraft.
Preparations had taken more than a few months. The BBC’s verification team found that a video of paratroopers practising landings in a mock settlement north of Rafah had been recorded before 25 August 2022. It was saved in a file labelled “Saqr Squadron”, showing that preparations had been under way for more than a year.
A CNN investigation analysed almost two years of training footage published by Hamas and found that fighters had trained at no fewer than six sites. It also found that, at dawn on the day of the attack, the gliders took off from near two training camps close to the fence, at the same site where locally made drones had been tested.
In a series on Substack about preparations for the Flood, one writer says the idea came from Mohammed Deif himself. According to the writer’s account, Hamas smuggled in about a dozen kits to assemble the gliders, and Deif selected 30 of his best fighters to form the “Saqr Squadron”.
The Israeli military’s account of the attack on Netiv HaAsara, the Israeli settlement closest to northern Gaza, describes how the “Saqr Squadron” operated on the ground. Published in March 2025, the investigation was described by the military as the most frustrating of its investigations into that day.
The investigation said three fighters landed by parachute at three separate points in the settlement between 6.39am and 6.42am. They were the vanguard of a larger force that was to cross by land from nearby Beit Hanoun.
For about two and a half hours, an armed force of 37 Israelis, including a senior officer and members of the security team, was unable to stop them. Seventeen residents were killed, including three security team members. Two of the three fighters returned to Gaza.
Palestinian social media users circulated names and photographs of the men they said made up the group. According to their accounts, Maysara Saleh was killed inside the town on the day of the Flood, while Ahmed Fawzi al-Wadiya returned to Gaza and was killed in an air strike during the war. The Israeli military announced al-Wadiya’s killing, identifying him as the commander of the attack on the settlement. The social media accounts also said Imad Abu Rakba returned to Gaza and was later killed in the third battle of Jabalia. Saleh Dahman was killed in the same battle; users identified him as the commander of the Saqr unit.
The official Palestinian account includes a video al-Qassam published in 2026 about field commander Murad Ahmed Abu Murad as part of “Moons of the Flood”, a series documenting the lives of its fallen fighters. The Brigades said he held the rank of company commander, led the Gaza Brigade’s air force, oversaw the development and testing of suicide drones, and was killed on 19 October 2023. In footage recorded before the Flood, Abu Murad stands near the border and tells the fighters that these places will be “the heroes’ crossing toward our occupied land.”
The occupation had announced Abu Murad’s assassination, describing him as the head of the aerial system in Gaza City and saying he had directed the fighters who crossed by air. On 28 October, it announced the assassination of Issam Abu Rukbeh, whom it identified as the commander of an aerial system encompassing drones, paragliders, surveillance and air defence.
The unit was not entirely unknown to the occupation. In May 2021, during the “Sword of Jerusalem” battle, the Israeli army announced that it had bombed a house it said contained equipment for Hamas’s paragliding unit. Leaked Israeli analyses and intelligence reports indicate that “Israel” had monitored the training but did not believe Hamas could carry out such an operation.
After the war, Israeli and US media published a document that the Israeli occupation army said it had found in Gaza. It set out a vision for building a military and civilian aviation force to serve the liberation project. The document proposed sharing individual paragliding experiences on social media and establishing a club in Gaza to attract young people interested in the sport.
The road to Palestine
Forty-two years separated the morning in March 1981 when a fedayeen fighter landed near Haifa Bay beneath a small wing and the morning of 7 October 2023 when the paragliders of the “Saqr Squadron” crossed Gaza’s fence. The factions, geography and equipment had changed: from the slopes of southern Lebanon to Gaza’s shores; from a motorised hang glider powered by a lawnmower engine to a two-seat paraglider; and from training in camps in Syria and Naameh to training under Israeli surveillance in Rafah and Beit Lahia. The question behind these attempts remained the same: how does a Palestinian reach his land when every route on the ground is closed?
Khaled Aker, Miloud Ben Najah Nouma, Awad al-Qeeq, Raed al-Attar, Issam Abu Rukba, Saleh Dahman and his comrades were separated by decades but shared the idea of flying over the wall. The wings that rose above the fence that morning carried a long history of attempts, some unsuccessful, others still unknown. Together, they paved the way for the moment when Palestinians crossed into their land, breaking the rules of security, gravity and, finally, technology, which Palestinian determination shattered.