Mohammed Bin Laden, Osama’s father, was a Saudi contractor who specialized in renovating mosques.

When it was decided to renovate the el-Aksa mosque, he was sent to Jerusalem by the Saudi king to help with the work. Adnan Husseini, the director of The Wakf, recalls that Bin Laden Sr. lived for several months in Jerusalem’s Shuafat neighborhood. His son, Osama, who was then seven years old, was at his side.

Bin Laden’s first serious meeting with the Palestinians came in The early ’80s. In December 1979 he arrived in Afghanistan immediately After the Soviet invasion and was one of the founders of the Islamic Salvation Front, the volunteer army made up of Moslems from all over the world who joined the fight against the Communists. In the mountains of Afghanistan he met Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian from the village of Yabed next to Jenin, who was a leader of the Moslem Brotherhood in northern Samaria.

Azzam, who became Bin Laden’s deputy, was an ideologue who called to Unite the Kalachnikov and the Koran in the war against the Soviets Specifically and in the war against the infidels in general. He was perhaps more of an influence than anyone else in Bin Laden’s process of radicalization.

Abdullah Azzam was killed in a mysterious explosion in his car, and his men accused the CIA of responsibility for his death.

In 1990 Bin Laden established the “Jihad Front Against the Jews and the Crusaders” — in effect, the international arm of his Al-Qaida organization. In order to give the stamp of religious law to his actions against Jews and Israel, a fatwa (religious ruling) was published in 1998 by religious authorities numbered among his supporters, according to which “All Moslems have the duty to kill the Americans and their allies anywhere on earth, without differentiating between military personnel and civilians, with the goal of liberating the el-Aksa mosque and the holy mosque in Mecca from the hold of the infidels, and in order to drive the American army From the lands of Islam.”

One of the first recruits to the new organization was Nabil Oukal, a Hamas operative and a resident of the Gaza Strip, who came to Pakistan to study. There he was drafted into the organization and sent to a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan. During his training he met one of Bin Laden’s senior aides. When he returned to Gaza, Oukal met with Sheikh Yassin and reported to him on his training. He received from Yassin $10,000 to be used to train suicide bombers. To this day it is not clear if there was a direct or indirect connection between the sheikh and Bin Laden to facilitate this cooperation. Instructions were sent to Oukal By e-mail by another one of Bin Laden operatives in Britain who was Supposed to arrive in Israel to carry out terror attacks. Oukal himself was arrested on June 1, 2000, on his way to a training camp in Pakistan.

In the year 2000 other Palestinian recruits of Bin Laden’s were arrested — Sayid Hindawi from Halhoul and Basel Abu-Daka from Tulkarm, both of whom had studied in Pakistan.

The security establishment believes that Bin Laden has several “sleeper” terrorist cells in the territories, and that they could begin to operate when the directive arrives from Afghanistan or from one of the secret headquarters in Europe

This article ran in Yediot Aharonot on October 12, 2001.

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