His father, who came from Gaza, ran a grocery in Carmel Market, where half of his clients were Jewish and he spoke Hebrew, which his son also picked up from companions among Sephardic Jews.

His family abandoned Jaffa by boat for Gaza on 13 May 1948, as part of a general flight inspired by news of the Deir Yassin massacre and a sense of Jewish military superiority.

He returned to Gaza in 1957 with a combined degree in philosophy and psychology, and a teacher's certificate from Ain Shams University, where he was assigned to teach at Al Zahra, a girls' school, a position that was, in his memoirs, allocated in order to make him a pariah in the city.

[10] Khalaf then felt the need to restore his reputation within the Palestinian community, and became one of the foremost advocates for the terror campaigns conducted by PLO fighters and others during the early 1970s.

Christopher Dobson, who met Khalaf in Cairo at this time, described him as someone who would pass unnoticed in a crowd, while topping Israel's most wanted list.

"[12] Khalaf opposed Arafat's alliance with Saddam Hussein, in so far as, he argued, one could not side with an occupying power when one was fighting in one's own country against an occupation.

[3] According to Elizabeth Thompson, Khalaf regarded Zionism as an ideology exploited by a political elite which manipulated memories of Nazism in order to create a persecution complex among Jews.

Tulkarem governor Issam Abu Bakr said that the school was named after "martyr Salah Khalaf in order to commemorate the memory of this great national fighter".

[20][21] An Italian public attorney and retired prosecutor—and former director of investigations into the loss of Itavia Flight 870— Judge Rosario Priore argued in a book that Abu Iyad had ordered two German terrorists linked to Venezuelan Carlos the Jackal to carry out the 1980 Bologna massacre (for which three neo-fascists were convicted, including Valerio Fioravanti).

[22] Former President of the Italian Republic Francesco Cossiga supported a similar thesis, but he accused George Habash instead of Abu Iyad.