Silat al-Harithiya is a Palestinian village in the Jenin Governorate of Palestine, located 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) northwest of Jenin in the northern West Bank. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics census, the town had a population of 9,422 in 2007 and 11,449 in 2017.

Abdullah Yusuf Azzam was a Palestinian jihadist and theologian. Belonging to the Salafi movement within Sunni Islam, he and his family fled from what had been the Jordanian-annexed West Bank after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War and pursued higher education in Jordan and Egypt before relocating to Saudi Arabia. In 1979, Azzam issued a fatwa advocating for "defensive jihad" in light of the outbreak of the Soviet–Afghan War, and subsequently moved to Pakistan to support the Afghan mujahideen.