Salah Khalaf

Salah Khalaf was born in Jaffa and was forced to flee by sea with his family to Gaza during the 1948 Nakba. Studying education and psychology at Al-Azhar and Dar al-Ulum in Cairo, he was elected president of the Palestinian Student Union and became the closest political partner of Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir.

In the late 1950s, Abu Iyad co-founded Fatah, rising to become the movement's chief political strategist and head of PLO unified security. A pragmatic, articulate diplomat who was among the earliest PLO leaders to advocate for a two-state solution based on mutual recognition, he was assassinated in Tunis in January 1991.