Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat led the Palestinian national movement for more than three decades, as founder of Fatah, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 and later first president of the Palestinian Authority. He moved from armed struggle against Israel, including attacks on civilians by groups under the PLO umbrella, to recognising Israel and signing the Oslo Accords, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. To most Palestinians he embodied their national cause; many Israelis regarded him as a terrorist, and Palestinian critics accused him of corruption or of conceding too much.

Arafat was born in Cairo in August 1929, on the 4th or the 24th, to a Palestinian merchant from Gaza. After his mother's death in 1933 he spent several years with relatives in Jerusalem. As a student at the university in Cairo he became an Arab nationalist, helped smuggle weapons to Palestinian irregulars and, during the 1948 war, fought near Gaza alongside the Muslim Brotherhood without joining it. He later qualified as a civil engineer and led a Palestinian students' union from 1952 to 1956.

In Kuwait from 1957, Arafat and friends including Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) founded Fatah by the end of the decade. Unlike groups that relied on Arab governments, it stood for armed struggle by Palestinians themselves. Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 discredited the Arab states, and in 1968 Fatah fighters, with the Jordanian army, held their ground against an Israeli assault on Karameh in Jordan. The battle made Arafat a hero, and on 4 February 1969 he was elected chairman of the PLO.

Palestinian militias became a state within a state in Jordan, and in September 1970, after hijackers from a PLO faction blew up three airliners, King Hussein's army moved against them; Palestinian deaths are put at about 3,500. Expelled in 1971, Arafat moved the PLO to Lebanon. In the 1970s groups linked to Fatah and other PLO factions carried out attacks abroad, including the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by Black September, which several sources describe as an arm of Fatah. In 1974 Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, saying he carried an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. The PLO became a party in the Lebanese Civil War, and Israel's 1982 invasion forced Arafat and his fighters out of Beirut to Tunis.

In Tunis Arafat escaped an Israeli air raid in 1985 that killed 73 people. The First Intifada, an uprising in the occupied territories from December 1987, revived its fortunes. On 15 November 1988 the PLO proclaimed a State of Palestine, and in December Arafat renounced terrorism and accepted Israel's right to exist. His support for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 cost him much Arab funding. Secret talks produced the Oslo Accords of 1993, under which the PLO and Israel recognised each other and Palestinian self-rule began in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

Arafat returned in 1994 and settled in Gaza City. In January 1996 he was elected president of the Palestinian Authority with 88.2% of the vote, in an election boycotted by Hamas and other opposition groups. His rule was criticised for authoritarianism, abuses by his security forces and the misuse of public funds. In July 2000 at Camp David he rejected an Israeli offer of a state in most of the West Bank and all of Gaza. The Second Intifada broke out that September, and for more than two years before his death Israel kept him confined to his Ramallah compound, accusing him of backing attacks.

Arafat fell ill in October 2004 and died at a military hospital near Paris on 11 November 2004, aged 75. The cause remains disputed: a Swiss team found that polonium poisoning was "reasonably supported", while French and Russian investigators found no evidence of foul play.

Our 1960 map shows the region where he founded Fatah, and the 1994 and 2000 maps show the Middle East during the years of Palestinian self-rule; see also Palestine.