Short answer: No. Leila Khaled, the veteran PFLP hijacker and longtime Palestinian resistance figure, has never supported Israel. Her public record runs the opposite direction, from her 1969 and 1970 hijackings through statements after October 7, 2023 in which she called the attack necessary and described Hamas fighters as "freedom fighters." As of August 2026, nothing in the record suggests any change in her position.
What Leila Khaled has actually said and done
1969-1970: Khaled hijacked TWA Flight 840 in August 1969, diverting the plane to Damascus with no injuries, and took part in the failed hijacking of El Al Flight 219 in September 1970 as part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's Dawson's Field operations. She was arrested in the United Kingdom and released weeks later in a hostage exchange. These two incidents, documented across multiple contemporaneous news histories and summarized on Wikipedia, are the foundation of her decades-long identification as a PFLP militant.
February 20, 2024: In an interview with the Australian outlet Green Left, Khaled said Hamas is "part of the Palestinian resistance and are also freedom fighters," claimed the October 7 attackers "did not attack ordinary people," only "military settlements," and said "neither Israel nor the Western media could prove that there were massacres." She repeated a similar account later that year in an interview with Mondoweiss.
March 8, 2024: The Jerusalem Post reported Khaled was scheduled to address a Palestinian Solidarity Campaign fundraiser in Birmingham, UK by video call, continuing her long-running role as a featured speaker at pro-Palestinian activist events in the West.
December 23, 2024: In an interview published by Mondoweiss, Khaled said of the October 7 attack, "The 7th of October was a must, it had to happen because the history of the struggle is long between us and the enemy." She described Israel as "an apartheid state" carrying out "a genocidal onslaught" and called armed resistance the primary path forward for Palestinians. She had made similar remarks earlier that year, in February 2024, to Green Left.
Mid-March 2025: Khaled, then 80, was hospitalized after suffering an intracranial hemorrhage. The South African Communist Party issued a statement, carried by Solidnet, wishing her a speedy recovery. No outlet has since reported her death, and Wikipedia's entry, last edited May 2026, continues to list her as living.
September 18, 2025: The Jerusalem Post reported that advertising for a Maryland socialist gun club's firearms-training event used imagery resembling Khaled alongside other militant figures, a sign that her image continues to circulate as an armed-resistance symbol in activist circles more than a year after October 7.
Who is Leila Khaled, and where does she fit in the broader picture
Leila Khaled, born April 9, 1944, is a lifelong member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist Palestinian faction designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and Israel. She became internationally known for the 1969 and 1970 hijackings above, and for decades afterward remained a public spokesperson for armed struggle against Israel, addressing university audiences, BDS conferences, and pro-Palestinian solidarity events. In a 2009 interview with +972 Magazine, she said BDS "doesn't liberate land," positioning boycott as a supplement to armed resistance rather than a replacement for it. There is no record of her expressing support for Israel, endorsing coexistence with it, or distancing herself from Hamas's actions on October 7, 2023. Her public statements from that period instead defend the attack as necessary and describe Hamas fighters as freedom fighters, a characterization at odds with the extensive documentation of mass civilian killings that day compiled by Israeli authorities, the United Nations, and independent journalists. Khaled suffered a serious stroke in March 2025, and her detailed health status since then has not been widely reported, but no credible outlet has reported her death, and encyclopedic sources continued to list her as living as of mid-2026.
The bottom line
Leila Khaled does not support Israel. She is a founding-generation PFLP militant whose entire public record, from the 1969-1970 hijackings through her 2024 statements praising the October 7 attack and calling Hamas fighters "freedom fighters," reflects consistent support for armed struggle against the Israeli state. As of the most recent verifiable reporting she is alive following a March 2025 stroke, and there is no indication of any shift in her position.
Wear where you stand
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
