A terrorist turned Nobel peace prize-winner, Yassir Arafat has been a central figure in Middle Eastern politics for the last 35 years.

The leader of the displaced Palestinian people has tried and failed to hold the line between his most hot-headed fellow refugees and the Israelis, while keeping the international community sympathetic to his cause.

The closest he came to delivering his vision of a viable Palestinian homeland was in 1993, when he signed the Oslo Peace Accords with Israel, under the aegis of President Bill Clinton.

Under the accords, nearly one million Palestinians were to live under their own jurisdiction in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But the vision crumbled as, first, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, was assassinated by an outraged Jewish right-winger, and later an violent insurrection against Israel by Palestinian militants challenged Mr Arafat's authority and gave Israel carte blanche to make incursions into the occupied territories.

Mr Arafat's ill-advised support for Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War came back to haunt him when George W Bush became President. He was cut out of the loop by the Bush Administration and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, who have insisted that there is no Palestinian leader to negotiate with.

He has subsequently spent the last two years immured in his headquarters in Ramallah, circled by Israeli tanks and unable to leave for fear of never being allowed to return.

Mr Arafat has been vague about his upbringing, claiming to have been born in Jerusalem in 1929 although records suggest he was actually born in Cairo, Egypt.

His father Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa, a prosperous merchant, was killed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war during which the teenage Arafat smuggled arms to Arab forces.

He spent his early career as an engineer in Kuwait where, in the late 1950s, he helped found the Fatah movement, the most effective of the various groups struggling to unify Palestinian armed opposition to Israel in the cause of an independent Palestine.

The terrorist group the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was established in 1964 and Mr Arafat became its chairman by the end of the decade. As a wily young resistance fighter based in Jordan, he won the status of hero among his people by organising raids into Israel.

In 1967 the Six Day War extended the control of Israel over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, increasing the misery of Palestinians.

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