A tireless politician, administrator and, in the opinion of some, an exhibitionist and opportunist, for more than 40 years, Yassir Arafat inspired his people to remain hopeful for eventual freedom from Israeli occupation. He also won almost universal recognition for his Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the sole representative of the Palestinian nation. In 1994 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, jointly with the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, and the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

In the end, however, he would take his dream of a Palestinian state to his grave, and at the time of his death the prospect of it seemed as remote as ever. After the Oslo peace agreement of 1993, which gave a measure of autonomy to the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he failed to convince Israel that the guerrilla leader had changed into a statesman. Not only did he fail to curb the terrorism of such rival organisations as Hamas and Islamic Jihad against Israeli civilians, but evidence suggested that he was complicit in similar atrocities carried out by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a branch of his own Fatah movement which he financed. Subsequently, when negotiations ground to a complete halt in 2001 and Arafat was put under house arrest by Israel in Ramallah in the West Bank, he did not allow any political institutions or individual leaders to emerge from his shadow to replace him.

By then, his closest aides appeared to have alienated the people they were supposed to represent. Having spent many years with him in exile in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia, his circle were commonly referred to as "the Tunisians", while suspected involvement in illicit financial deals sullied their reputations further. Younger candidates for leadership, who had spent all their lives in the occupied territories and thought they understood Israel better, were marginalised.

Mohammed Abdel-Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, the sixth child of his father's first marriage, resisted being drawn on the details of his life, preferring, instead, to surround his circumstances with myths to suit the political needs of the moment. Accordingly, he claimed that he was born in Jerusalem, even though his early educational records in Egypt show him to have been born in Cairo, where his father had transferred his mercantile business two years earlier.

On his father's side, he was a member of the prominent al-Husseini clan of Gaza, while his mother was one of the Abu Sauds of Jerusalem, counting as minor aristocracy in the old city. Contrary to another claim, he was not related to the notorious Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who advocated alliance with Nazi Germany during the Second World War and who led the Palestinian government in exile after 1948.

Arafat's mother died in 1933, when he was four. He was sent with an infant brother to Jerusalem to spend three years at the home of a maternal uncle. In 1937, shortly after his father took an Egyptian wife, he was taken back to Cairo. There he had a comfortable and relatively uneventful upbringing, emotionally attached to Palestine, which he visited regularly, but immersed in the political and social culture of wartime Cairo: pro-German, anti-monarchist and increasingly Islamic. It was there, at Farouk Secondary School, that he gained the nickname Yassir (carefree). For the rest of his life, he spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent.

In November 1947, the UN voted to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews, a plan which assigned territory on the basis of 44 per cent to 56 per cent. Arab states and the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan. In May the following year the UK ended its mandate, and Jewish leaders proclaimed the State of Israel. War broke out between the the new state and a number of Arab armies, resulting in the heavy defeat of the latter. By the time a ceasefire was obtained in January 1949, the Jewish state had expanded its lands and occupied roughly 75 per cent of Palestine. The Arabs felt humiliated and began a new era of turmoil and revolution. (In December 1949 Jordan annexed the area known as the West Bank.)

Traumatised, young Arafat first decided to seek a new life by applying to study in Texas. But he changed his mind after savouring the attraction of political activity among school pupils, and entered King Fouad I University (now Cairo University) to study civil engineering in the autumn of 1949. But clearly he was not interested in his subject, for it took him seven years to obtain a poor degree.

In contrast, he was quite successful in getting elected to a number of student posts, at first in the faculty of engineering as an Egyptian supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, but later in the Palestinian Students' League. The association with the Brothers introduced him to urban guerrilla warfare and made him an explosives expert, so that, at the time of the invasion of the Suez Canal zone by the forces of Israel, Britain and France in 1956, he was called up into the Egyptian army as a bomb-disposal officer.

This was after spending three months in prison after an abortive attempt, in October 1954, on the life of Colonel Nasser, the strongman of the Egyptian regime that had overthrown King Farouk.

There is no evidence that Arafat took part in any operations against Israel from the Gaza Strip, then ruled by Egypt, though he later claimed such activity. It does, however, seem that he was active in uncovering salvageable weapons on the Second World War battlefield of El Alamain to send to Gaza.

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