chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1968. In 1956 he co‐founded Al Fatah, the Arab group that came to dominate the PLO from 1967. In 1974 he became the first representative of a non‐governmental organization to address the United Nations General Assembly. Despite challenges to his authority within the PLO, he remained its leader until his death. After the signing of a PLO–Israeli peace accord providing for limited Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Arafat became leader of the new Palestine National Authority in July 1994. The same year he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Arafat won a landslide victory in the first Palestinian presidential elections (1996). However, from 2000 Israel held Arafat’s regime responsible for failing to curb the second intifada and, except for a short period in 2002, kept him a virtual prisoner in his Ramallah headquarters from 2001 until shortly before his death.