Yasser Arafat (real name Mohammed Abed Ar'ouf Arafat) was a Palestinian resistance leader. He was born in 1929 at Jerusalem and died in 2004. Attending Cairo University from 1952 to 1956 he was leader of the Palestinian Students' Union before co-founding the Al Fatah resistance group in 1956, a group which was to join the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) upon its formation in 1964, and within five years control the PLO with Arafat as its leader. In 1994 he was jointly awarded the Nobel prize for peace with Israel's foreign minister Shimon Peres for a negotiated peace deal aimed at ending the conflict in Palestine - at the time of his death the conflict in Palestine had still not been resolved, and many Israelis considered him a terrorist who supported terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Research Yasser Arafat