Haidar Abdel-Shafi, was a Palestinian physician, community leader and political leader who was the head of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference of 1991.
23 Facts About Haidar Abdel-Shafi
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi attended primary school in Gaza; secondary education as a boarder at the Arab College in Jerusalem and graduated in 1936.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi graduated in 1943 from the American University of Beirut College of Medicine in Beirut.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi worked at the British Mandate of Palestine's Municipal Hospital in Jaffa.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi returned to Gaza and entered private medical practice.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi then co-founded a branch of the Palestine Medical Society in 1945, and participated in the first Palestine Medical Congress in 1946.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi returned to Gaza in 1954, by which time it was under Egyptian rule.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi worked as a surgeon at the Tal Zahur Hospital.
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In 1957 Dr Haidar Abdel-Shafi married Hoda Khalidi, from a prominent Jerusalemite family.
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Dr Haidar Abdel-Shafi was appointed as Head of medical services in the Gaza Strip from 1957 until 1960.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi held a two-year term as chairman of the first Palestinian Legislative Council in Gaza beginning in 1962.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi was a delegate to the first all-Palestinian conference which convened in Jerusalem in 1964 and helped establish the Palestine Liberation Organization.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi served as a member of the first PLO-Executive Committee.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi was later temporarily detained by Israel, suspected of support for the military activities of George Habash's new guerilla faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an offshoot of the Arab Nationalist Movement.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi denied membership, but expressed his sympathy for the group's goals.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi was the founder and director of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in the Gaza Strip in 1972, his own rallying organisation for Palestinian improvement.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi was attacked by Islamists, who, in 1981 burned down his clinic.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi was a founding member in the late 1970s of the National Guidance Committee of Palestine.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi broke with the Palestinian negotiating team over the Oslo peace agreement over the question of the Israeli settlements.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi was one of the first to predict that the Oslo process would collapse because it failed to tackle the issue of settlements.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi took up leadership of the PLC's political committee.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi co-founded the Palestinian National Initiative in 2002 along with Edward Said, Mustafa Barghouti and Ibrahim Dakkak as a national platform for combining the struggle for national liberation and the return of refugees with the values of national unity, democracy and social justice.
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Haidar Abdel-Shafi is survived by his wife, four children and seven grandchildren.