Yasser Arafat, also spelled 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; some sources support his claim to have been born in Jerusalem on Aug. 4, 1929, while other sources say he was born in Gaza. 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 Arafat 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. In 2001, after suicide attacks in Israel that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon blamed Arafat for instigating, Arafat was confined by Israel to his headquarters in Ramallah.
