Yasser Arafat is Born

Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (Arabic: محمد عبد الرؤوف عرفات القدوة الحسيني‎, 24 August 1929 – 11 November 2004), popularly known as Yasser Arafat (ياسر عرفات) or by his kunya Abu Ammar (أبو عمار), was a Palestinian leader and a Laureate of the Nobel Prize. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and leader of the Fatah political party, which he founded in 1959. Arafat spent much of his life fighting against Israel in the name of Palestinian self-determination. Originally opposed to Israel's existence, he modified his position in 1988 when he accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242.

In 1993, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat recognized the State of Israel in an official letter to its prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. In response to Arafat's letter, Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Arafat was the Chairman of the PLO Executive Committee from 1969 until his death in 2004. He was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen).

Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo to Palestinian parents. His father, Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, was a Palestinian from Gaza; whose mother, Yasser's paternal grandmother, was Egyptian. Arafat's father worked as a textile merchant in Cairo's religiously mixed Sakakini District. Arafat was the second-youngest of seven children and was, along with his younger brother Fathi, the only offspring born in Cairo. His mother, Zahwa Abul Saud, was from a Jerusalem family. She died from a kidney ailment in 1933, when Arafat was four years of age.