- Born
- Died
- Birth nameMuhammad 'Abd Ar-Ra'uf Al-Qudwah Al-Husayni
- Height5′ 2″ (1.57 m)
- Yasir Arafat was born Muhammad 'Abd Ar-Ra'uf Al-Qudwah Al-Husayni on August 24, 1929 in Cairo, Egypt, to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother. He was raised in Cairo but always considered himself Palestinian. In the late 1940s, while a student in Egypt, he became an ardent Arab nationalist and adopted the name Yasir, after Yasir al Birah, a famous Arab resistance leader. When Arafat as 14, he was involved in gunrunning for Arab guerrillas in Gaza, a task he continued to perform during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. After the war, Arafat entered the University of Cairo, earning a degree in engineering in 1955.
During his student days, he began to train secretly as a guerrilla, becoming an expert in demolitions and taking part in raids on British installations near the Suez Canal. After his graduation from the university, Arafat was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Egyptian army. He saw some combat at Port Said and Abu Kabir during the Suez war of October 29-November 6, 1956. In the mid-1960s, Arafat emerged as the chief military and political leader of the Palestinian homeland movement. From his residence in Kuwait where he ran a successful engineering concern, he published the major nationalist organ, Our Palestine, and established Al Fatah, an acronym for the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine.
In 1967, after the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, he became the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) where throughout the 1970s he directed the PLO in a series of terrorist attacks against Israel and its Western allies. In an effort to garner broader support for his movement in the 1980s he began to distance himself from the PLO's more violent factions like the Abu Nidal group, but has not firmly renounced terrorism as a means of achieving his goals to create a Palestinian state within Israel. He had residences in Gaza and Tunis, where the PLO has its headquarters. He died after a short illness in November 2004, aged 75.
- IMDb mini biography by: Anonymous
- SpouseSuha Tawil(July 17, 1990 - November 11, 2004) (his death, 1 child)
- Turban and sunglasses
- Cropped beard
- Reportedly a huge "Tom and Jerry" fan. He would make guests wait if they interrupted him watching an episode until it had finished.
- Had one daughter, Zahwa, born 24 July 1995, in Paris.
- Has his look-alike puppet in the French show Les Guignols de l'info (1988).
- Arafat was born August 24, 1929, in Cairo, Egypt, though he has often said he was born in Jerusalem. He was the sixth of seven children of a Palestinian merchant and his wife, a member of a prominent Arab family in Jerusalem
- Awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Shimon Peres Yitzhak Rabin.
- This is my homeland no one can kick me out.
- Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.
- I come bearing an olive branch in one hand, and the freedom fighter's gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.
- The victory march will continue until the Palestinian flag flies in Jerusalem and in all of Palestine.
- We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.
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