Kōzō Okamoto

Okamoto was born on December 7, 1947, in Kumamoto, in southern Japan, into a middle-class family.[6] He grew up in a large family and had no particular connection to the Palestinian cause during his childhood.[3] His later identification with that cause developed through his involvement with Japanese revolutionary organizations and the PFLP, which trained him and planned the airport operation for the Japanese Red Army.[3]

The Japanese Red Army emerged around 1970 after breaking away from the Japanese Communist League–Red Army Faction.[4] Its historical objectives included overthrowing Japan’s government and monarchy and fomenting world revolution.[4] Its leader, Fusako Shigenobu, presented Palestine as the forefront of the organization’s struggle against international imperialism.[4] The organization’s international activities during the 1970s included the Lod Airport attack, Japanese airliner hijackings, the seizure of the French Embassy in The Hague in 1974, and an attempted takeover of the United States Embassy in Kuala Lumpur.[4]

Before the Lod operation, Okamoto volunteered for the PFLP’s military wing and underwent military training in Lebanon.[7] The attackers trained in Baalbek, and Wadie Haddad, the head of PFLP External Operations, planned the operation with some input from Okamoto.[1] The Japanese Red Army provided Okamoto with a false passport bearing the name Daisuke Namba, after a man who had attempted to assassinate Crown Prince Hirohito in 1923.[3] Within the PFLP, he used the nom de guerre Ahmad.[3]

At about 10 p.m. on May 30, 1972, Okamoto arrived at Lod Airport on an Air France flight from Rome with fellow Japanese Red Army members Tsuyoshi Okudaira and Yasuyuki Yasuda.[1] The three traveled using false passports and collected baggage containing assault rifles and grenades after their arrival.[8] They wore business suits and carried cases that appeared to contain violins; inside were Czech vz. 58 assault rifles with their butt stocks removed.[1] The cases attracted little attention from security officers, who were looking for Arab terrorists.[2] Inspection of checked luggage was uncommon at the time.[3]

In the airport’s waiting and baggage-claim area, the attackers took out their weapons and opened fire on passengers and airport personnel.[1] They threw grenades while changing magazines, turning the arrival area into the scene of a mass-casualty terrorist attack.[1] The death toll included eight Israelis, one Canadian, and 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, who were United States citizens traveling to the Holy Land.[2] Approximately 80 people were wounded.[2] Among those killed was Vasthi Zila Morales, the mother of survivor Dámaris Pérez.[8]

Israeli biophysicist Aharon Katzir was also among the dead.[2] Katzir had been considered a candidate for Israel’s presidency; his brother Ephraim became the country’s fourth president in 1973.[2] A photograph taken on June 2, 1972, shows David Ben-Gurion attending Aharon Katzir’s funeral, while Katzir’s widow, Rina, is supported at the graveside by their son and daughter.[9]

Yasuda and Okudaira died during the attack, leaving Okamoto as the only surviving attacker.[1] Okudaira ran onto the tarmac and fired at passengers disembarking from an El Al aircraft before dying from the explosion of one of his grenades.[1] Okamoto also ran into the area outside the terminal and fired toward parked aircraft before being captured.[10] He was wounded by security fire, pursued, and subdued by Hanan Zeitun, an El Al traffic officer.[1][10]

During questioning, Okamoto identified himself as a Japanese Red Army member and described the operation as part of a world revolution conducted in cooperation with the PFLP.[10] He said, “They sent me to attack Tel Aviv airport.”[10] Initial reports of Japanese participation met with disbelief in Japan, and a Japanese embassy official visited the hospital to confirm Okamoto’s nationality.[1] Okamoto told the diplomat that he had nothing personal against Israelis, explaining his participation with the words, “It was my duty as a soldier of the revolution.”[1]

The PFLP celebrated the attackers’ international involvement, describing them as men who had come “from thousands of miles away to join the Palestinian people in their struggle.”[1] The attackers presented the operation as revenge for Israel’s killing of two terrorists who had attempted to hijack a plane at Lod Airport on May 8, 1972.[1] They also used the name “Operation Deir Yassin,” invoking the events at the village of Deir Yassin in 1948.[1]

Okamoto’s trial opened on July 10, 1972, before a special military court established by the Israeli chief of staff and convened in Lod.[11] The proceedings lasted a week and attracted extensive Israeli and international media attention.[11] The charges included causing the deaths of 24 people and injuring dozens more.[11] Okamoto was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.[12] He remained in Israeli custody for 13 years.[1]

In May 1985, Okamoto was released as part of the Jibril Agreement prisoner exchange.[11] The exchange involved Israel’s release of 1,150 prisoners in return for three Israelis captured during the 1982 First Lebanon War.[12] The agreement was made with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command.[12] Okamoto’s release ended his imprisonment in Israel but did not resolve Japan’s pursuit of him, and Japanese authorities continued to seek his return.[1][5]

Following his release, Okamoto lived in Libya and Syria before returning to Lebanon in 1997.[7] He settled in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and was arrested in 1997 for passport forgery and visa violations.[1] He served a three-year prison term for using forged documents.[7] Japan repeatedly sought his extradition from Lebanon, but the Lebanese authorities refused to surrender him.[5]

In 2000, Lebanon granted Okamoto political asylum.[4] His release and asylum followed weeks of demonstrations by pro-Palestinian groups.[3] Four other Japanese Red Army members arrested in Lebanon in 1997 were deported to Japan, whereas Okamoto was allowed to remain.[3][4] He subsequently lived in PFLP care in Beirut and rarely appeared in public.[3][5]

A profile published in 2022 described Okamoto as living in semi-hiding, with limited knowledge of the outside world and a tightly ordered daily routine.[3] He ate meals at set times and spent hours watching cartoons, including “Tom and Jerry.”[3] His PFLP minders had supplied bundles of cigarettes three times a day, although he had recently stopped smoking.[3] The same profile described his continuing identification with Palestine and his rejection of what he called the occupier.[3]

In a 2017 interview with the Japanese newspaper Mainichi, Okamoto said that he felt sorry for the victims but rejected describing the airport attack as terrorism.[13] He instead called it “an armed struggle started jointly with the PFLP” and asserted that armed struggles “become the best propaganda.”[13] His remarks maintained his revolutionary justification for the operation despite his expression of sorrow for those it had harmed.[13]

In May 2022, Okamoto made a rare public appearance at a PFLP ceremony in Beirut marking 50 years since the massacre.[3] The event took place at a cemetery near the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp, where he laid a wreath honoring his fellow Japanese Red Army members and flashed a V-sign.[3] He wore a Palestinian flag and a PFLP slogan, walked with assistance, and did not speak during the half-hour ceremony.[5] He remained wanted in Japan at the time.[3]

Okamoto died in Beirut on July 23, 2026, aged 78.[5] The PFLP announced his death and placed it in Beirut’s Dahiyeh district.[5] Members and supporters of the PFLP carried his body in a funeral procession in Beirut on July 24.[12] The PFLP, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad issued public eulogies praising him and the Lod Airport attack.[7] In its posthumous statement, the PFLP called him “a battle hero of the immortal operation at Lod Airport,” continuing its celebration of the massacre more than five decades after it occurred.[7]

The Lod Airport massacre prompted an overhaul of Israeli airport security, including a division of responsibilities between the police and state security.[2] The attackers’ arrival as Japanese passengers carrying weapons in apparent violin cases had exploited security attention directed toward Arab terrorists.[2] Their journey from Rome and the concealment of rifles and grenades in baggage became central details in accounts of how they reached the airport’s passenger area armed.[1]

The massacre also left a lasting commemorative legacy in Puerto Rico, whose Christian pilgrims constituted the largest group among those killed.[2] In 2006, Puerto Rico enacted legislation designating May 30 as Lod Massacre Remembrance Day.[2] The victims included people who had traveled to the Holy Land on pilgrimage, as well as Israeli airport users and the Canadian victim.[2] The attack’s effects on individual families continued to feature in later reporting, including the story of survivor Dámaris Pérez and her mother, Vasthi Zila Morales, who was killed.[8]

In Israel, the murder of Aharon Katzir connected the massacre to a prominent scientific and public family.[2] Ben-Gurion’s attendance at Katzir’s funeral, and the image of Katzir’s widow supported by their children, formed part of the contemporary photographic record of the mourning.[9] The surviving photograph’s title explicitly connects Katzir’s death to Okamoto’s terrorist group at Lod Airport.[9] Ephraim Katzir’s election as president the following year added a further connection between the bereaved family and Israeli national life.[2]

Responses in Japan were sharply divided.[14] Pro-Arab students praised the attackers and sought donations for Okamoto’s legal defense, while sympathizers with Israel raised money for the injured and bereaved.[14] A group in Kyoto held a prayer meeting for the victims.[14] These responses included both support for the perpetrators’ political cause and practical or religious expressions of solidarity with the people they had attacked.[14]

Japan’s prime minister promptly sent a delegation to apologize and offered financial compensation to victims’ families.[15] Arab states protested the apology, after which a Japanese Foreign Ministry delegation explained the gesture as humanitarian.[15] The episode reflected the diplomatic pressures surrounding Japan’s relations with Israel and Arab countries.[15]

During the 1972 Munich hostage crisis, the hostage-takers initially demanded Okamoto’s release alongside prisoners held in Israel and members of the German Baader-Meinhof group.[16] His inclusion in those demands linked his name to another terrorist crisis only months after the Lod massacre.[16]

The Japanese Red Army’s cooperation with the PFLP was an expression of its international revolutionary program.[1][4] Its leadership’s identification of Palestine as a leading front against international imperialism provided an ideological context for Japanese participation in an attack on an Israeli airport.[4] Training in Lebanon, planning by PFLP External Operations, and the deployment of Japanese gunmen connected the two organizations in the operation.[1] The massacre remained one of the Japanese Red Army’s major international attacks of the 1970s.[4]

The PFLP continued to honor Okamoto during his lifetime and after his death, including at the 2022 anniversary ceremony and his 2026 funeral procession.[3][12] Its commemoration of the attackers stood alongside the separate remembrance of their victims in Puerto Rico and Israel.[2][9] Okamoto’s long residence in PFLP care and his continued status as a wanted man in Japan were defining features of his later public life.[3][5] He also continued to reject the characterization of the massacre as terrorism.[13]

Published accounts differ on the massacre’s casualty totals. Several sources report 26 people killed and about 80 wounded.[1][2] Maariv and Ynet give lower figures of 24 killed and 71 wounded.[11][5] The discrepancy is not resolved in the cited accounts.

The attack’s financing has been the subject of speculation rather than an established finding.[2] One account relays a suggestion that the PFLP used part of a $5 million ransom received from West Germany in February 1972 for hostages aboard a hijacked Lufthansa flight to pay for the Lod operation.[2] That proposed connection is not presented as a demonstrated source of the attack’s funding.[2]

Accounts also differ on Okamoto’s attitude toward capital punishment during his trial.[3][13] One says that he pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, while another says that he consistently sought execution.[3][13] The latter quotes his court-appointed Israeli lawyer, through an interview recounted by academic Patricia Steinhoff, as describing him as “working for the prosecution.”[3] The differing descriptions do not alter the outcome: he received a life sentence and remained imprisoned until the 1985 exchange.[1]

An encyclopedia account associates Okamoto’s reported mental illness with “purported torture” in Israeli custody and says that he converted to Islam and remained in Libya after his release.[17] The allegation of torture is presented there as purported, not established.[17] Other accounts place him in Lebanon, documenting his 1997 arrest, political asylum in 2000, and subsequent public appearances in Beirut.[1][5]

Okamoto rejected the characterization of the massacre as terrorism and described it as revolutionary armed struggle.[13] The PFLP later glorified him and the attack.[7] These statements expressed their political position; the cited accounts characterize the event as a terrorist attack on passengers and airport personnel.[1][2] Okamoto’s stated sorrow for victims in 2017 coexisted with his defense of armed violence as propaganda.[13]