Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
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Hani al-Hassan (1939 - 6 July 2012), a Palestinian politician considered one of the founders of the Fatah movement. He was born in Haifa, of a middle-class and low-income Palestinian family. His father, Saeed Al-Hassan, was a member of the guerrilla groups formed by Sheikh Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam. Al-Hassan held several positions in the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) led by Arafat, the last of which was the deputy head of its central committee and the commissioner for external relations. Al-Hassan studied engineering in Germany and obtained a doctorate in media from Russia. He returned to Gaza in 1995 and became head of the foreign relations department in the Fatah movement and a political advisor to Arafat. He was appointed in charge of mobilization and organization in the Fatah movement to "restore the internal situation", and he had strong relations with the organization of the Fatah movement and the movement's field leaders and cadres in the Palestinian territories. For years, he was an advisor to President Arafat for political and strategic affairs. In 2002, he assumed the Ministry of the Interior, through which he was entrusted with the task of unifying the Palestinian security services into three agencies. Al-Hassan was famous for being a man of secret missions and for having good international and Arab relations.
It has played major roles in important stations that have had an impact on the Palestinian cause. He led the negotiations with the American envoy Philip Habib in 1982 that led to the exit of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon. In Lebanon, he also played the role of a man with difficult tasks and was Arafat's envoy to the Lebanese Maronite parties. He was also able to talk to the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad at the height of the Lebanese crisis and the deterioration of Syrian-Palestinian relations. In 1979, he became the first ambassador of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Islamic Republic of Iran, after receiving from the leadership of the Iranian revolution the offices of the Israeli mission in Tehran. He was assigned the task of representing the Fatah movement in Europe and then representing the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Jordanian capital in the seventies and early eighties. He also held the presidency of the French-Palestinian Committee between 1986 and 1992, and played an important role with Saudi Arabia and in the Egyptian-Palestinian Committee. Despite his opposition to the Oslo Accords, Al-Hassan was a supporter of the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and participated in a secret Palestinian-Israeli meeting in 1986.
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