GAZA: Yasser Arafat, born Mohammed Yasser al-Qedwa al-Husseini, the Palestinian President and symbol of their struggle for nationhood, was born on the 4th of August 1929, although sources differ as to whether it was in Jerusalem or Cairo.

He was educated in Egypt and graduated from Fouad Al-Awal University in Cairo with a bachelor's degree in engineering.

A member and head of the Palestinian Student Union, formed in Cairo in 1944, he was also spokesman of the Palestinian National Movement. As an Egyptian army reservist, he fought in Egypt's 1956 war against Britain, France and Israel, known variously as "the threesome invation", the Suez conflict and (in Israel) the Sinai Campaign.

He left Egypt in 1958 and headed for Kuwait, where he met several Palestinian resistance fighters, with whom he returned to the West Bank, then under Jordanian occupation, to found the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, known as Fatah. He was formally appointed its chairman in 1968, after Israel had conquered the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war.

The aftermath of the war saw Arafat in Jordan, although he made secret visits to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem.

Inn 1969 he was elected Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, and in 1973 he would become commander of the Palestinian Revolution troops.

Before then however, the PLO suffered a serious setback when Palestinians based in Jordan clashed with the Jordanian troops between September 1970 and July 1971. Black September, as it became known, saw Arafat and his troops expelled from the Hashemite Kingdom to Lebanon.

But Arafat bounced back from the defeat and 1974 was his, and the Palestinians' turning point, marked by his being invited to address the General Assembly of the United Nations.

As Arafat stood at the UN, a pistol in his belt and an olive branch in his hand, the Palestinian cause became seared into the world's consciousness.

At the same time Palestinian troops in Lebanon and elsewhere continued attacks against Israel and Israeli and Jewish targets, and in 1982 Israel invaded south Lebanon in what quickly became clear was a campaign beyond its stated aim of forcing the PLO out from the south of that country.

With Israeli troops breathing down his neck, and himself in the cross-hairs of an Israeli sniper's rifle, Arafat was forced, with his men, to flee again, ending up in Tunisia.

Defeated militarily, the PLO began transforming itself primarily into a political and diplomatic organization and on November 15, 1988 Arafat delivered a speech in Algeria announcing the independence and the establishment of the Palestinian state-in-exile. He was elected president of the state-in-waiting.

The breakthrough for the Palestinian cause came in 1993, when the PLO and Israel signed the principles which laid the groundwork for the Oslo Israeli-Palestinian interim peace accords.

The accords led to Arafat's triumphant return to Gaza in 1994 and sparked the formation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) with Arafat at its head.

For his role in negotiating Oslo, Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with then-Israeli Premier Itzhak Rabin and then- Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

In January 1996 Arafat was re-elected President of the PA in the first elections ever held in the Palestinian territories.

But the hope generated by the Oslo accords, which called for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, was never realized.

The process fell apart after the July 2000 Camp David Middle East peace summit, when US president Bill Clinton, Israel Premier Ehud Barak and Arafat failed, despite three weeks of intensive negotiating, to solve issues still unresolved.

The deadlock in the peace process saw the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, erupt in late September 2000, in which violence between the two sides took the lives of thousands of people, the majority of them Palestinians.-dpa