Yāsir ʿArafāt, orig. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Qudwah al-Ḥusaynī, (born August 1929—died Nov. 11, 2004, Paris, France), Palestinian leader. The date and place of his birth are disputed. A birth certificate registered in Cairo, Egypt, gives Aug. 24, 1929, but some sources support his claim to have been born in Jerusalem on Aug. 4, 1929. He graduated from the University of Cairo as a civil engineer and served in the Egyptian army during the 1956 Suez Crisis. That year, working as an engineer in Kuwait, he cofounded the guerrilla organization Fatah, which became the leading military component of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which he led from 1969. In 1974 the PLO was formally recognized by the UN, and ʿArafāt became the first leader of a nongovernmental organization to address the UN. In 1988 he acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, and in 1993 he formally recognized Israel during direct talks regarding land controlled by Israel since the Six-Day War. In 1994 he shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with Israelis Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. In 1996 he became president of the new Palestinian Authority.
