Birth: NULL/NULL/1935 Death:NULL/NULL/1988
Born in Ramleh on 10 Oct. 1935; expelled in the Nakba of 1948 and fled to Gaza, where his family settled in Bureij camp; received his secondary education in Bureij; joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1951 and a paramilitary wing, Katibat Al-Haq, from which he organized independent cells that carried out attacks on Israel from Gaza from 1954; imprisoned by Egypt for his fida’i activities; studied in Cairo from 1956 and received military training there; co-founder (with Yasser Arafat) of the first Fateh-cell in 1957; Fateh founding member in 1958-1959; worked in Kuwait mainly as a teacher from 1959-1963; began issuing the monthly clandestine Fateh magazine Filastinuna Nida’al Hayat (Our Palestine, The Call of Life) in Beirut in Oct. 1959; PLO and Fateh military chief since the 1960s in charge of recruitment and training of Fateh fighters; settled in Algeria and became head of the first office opened by Fateh in an Arab country in Jan. 1963; started the first Fateh military training camp; first Palestinian delegate, along with Yasser Arafat, to Peking for talks with Chinese officials in May 1964; later visited North Vietnam and North Korea, where he received advanced military education; settled in Damascus in 1965; after the 1967 occupation, assumed major responsibilities in the Fateh Central Committee as commander of the Al-Assifa forces and served as link between underground activist cells inside the OPT and the Palestinian national movement; played an instrumental role in the PLO’s relations with a number of Arab states, incl. Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia; member of the PNC and of the PLO’s Supreme Military Council; also in charge of commando operations in the OPT and inside Isr ael; relocated after the 1970 Black September to Beirut, and remained crucial in the development of underground cells in the OPT; left for Tunis after the Israeli 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which changed his political thinking from believing in the PLO’s ability to deliver a solution to the Palestine Question from outside to the belief that it must come from within the West Bank and Gaza; deported by Jordan in July 1986 in response to a Fateh statement a month earlier assailing Jordan, its policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians and its stand on pan-Arabism; played a major role in the coordination of the first Intifada in its early days (from Dec. 1087); assassinated in his house in Tunis by Israeli commandoes on 16 April 1988, along with his bodyguards; buried in Yarmouk RC, Damascus, five days later.
