জীবনী
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. Although raised in Cairo, he always identified as Palestinian. In the late 1940s, while studying in Egypt, he became a passionate Arab nationalist and adopted the name Yasir, inspired by Yasir al Birah, a renowned Arab resistance leader. At 14, Arafat engaged in gunrunning for Arab guerrillas in Gaza, a role he continued during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After the war, he attended Cairo University, earning an engineering degree in 1955.
During his studies, he secretly trained as a guerrilla, mastering demolitions and participating in raids on British installations near the Suez Canal. After graduating, Arafat was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Egyptian army and fought in Port Said and Abu Kabir during the Suez Crisis from October 29 to November 6, 1956. By the mid-1960s, Arafat had become the leading military and political figure in the Palestinian nationalist movement. From his base in Kuwait, where he managed a successful engineering business, he published the key nationalist publication, Our Palestine, and founded Al Fatah, an acronym for the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine.
Following the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, he assumed leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Throughout the 1970s, he directed the PLO in numerous attacks against Israel and its Western allies. In the 1980s, aiming to broaden support for his cause, he distanced himself from the PLO's more violent factions, such as the Abu Nidal group, though he did not completely renounce the use of terrorism to achieve the establishment of a Palestinian state within Israel. Arafat maintained residences in Gaza and Tunis, where the PLO headquarters were located. He passed away after a brief illness in November 2004 at the age of 75.
