Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (24 August 1929 – 11 November 2004) was a Palestinian political leader. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004 and President of the Palestinian National Authority from 1994 to 2004. Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, for the negotiations at Oslo. In 2004, after effectively being confined within his Ramallah compound for over two years by the Israeli army, Arafat fell into a coma and died.
About Yasser Arafat in brief
Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (24 August 1929 – 11 November 2004) was a Palestinian political leader. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004 and President of the Palestinian National Authority from 1994 to 2004. Ideologically an Arab nationalist, he was a founding member of the Fatah political party, which he led from 1959 until 2004. Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, for the negotiations at Oslo. In late 2004, after effectively being confined within his Ramallah compound for over two years by the Israeli army, Arafat fell into a coma and died. While the cause of Arafat’s death has remained the subject of speculation, investigations by Russian and French teams determined no foul play was involved. He remains a controversial figure. The majority of Palestinian people view him as a heroic freedom fighter and martyr who symbolized the national aspirations of his people. Most Israelis came to regard him as an unrepentant terrorist, while Palestinian rivals, including Islamists and several PLO leftists, often denounced him for being corrupt or too submissive in his concessions to the Israeli government. He had a deteriorating relationship with his father, and did not attend his father’s funeral when he died in 1952. He lived in Gaza City and was the second-youngest of seven children, along with his younger brother Fathi, the only offspring born in Cairo.
His mother, Yasser’s paternal grandmother, was Egyptian. His father battled in the Egyptian courts for 25 years to claim family land in Egypt as part of his inheritance but was unsuccessful. He worked as a textile merchant in Cairo’s religiously mixed Sakakini District. In 1937, his mother sent Yasser and Fathi to live with their uncle Salim Abul Saud in the Moroccan Quarter of the Old City of Old City. They lived there for four years with their older sister, Inam, until their father’s death in 1952, when Arafat moved back to Gaza City to be with his mother. He died of a kidney ailment when he was four years of age, when his mother was just four years old. He is survived by his brother, Fathi and his sister Inam. He also had a son, Yassar, who was born in 1953. He fought alongside the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He served as president of the General Union of Palestinian Students from 1952 to 1956. In the latter part of the 1950s he co-founded Fatah, a paramilitary organisation seeking the removal of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian state. In 1967 he joined the PLO and in 1969 was elected chair of Palestinian National Council. In 1988, he acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and sought a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestinian conflict. In 1994 he returned to Palestine, settling in Gaza and promoting self-governance for the Palestinian territories.
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