Yasser Arafat

Also spelled Yāsir ʿArafāt, byname of Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Qudwah al-Ḥusaynī, also called Abū ʿAmmār, (born August 24, 1929, Cairo, Egypt—died November 11, 2004, Paris, France).

President (1996–2004) of the Palestinian Authority (PA), chairman (1969–2004) of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and leader of Fatah, the largest of the constituent PLO groups. In 1993 he led the PLO to a peace agreement with the Israeli government. Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres of Israel were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994.