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Mohammed Dahlan

mohammed dahlan

Mohammed Dahlan

Fatah leader in Gaza and representative for Khan Younis in the Palestinian Legislative Council

(Born 1961)

Mohammed Dahlan was born in 1961 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.  He received a BA in business administration from the Islamic University of Gaza.

As a student leader, Dahlan was a founding member of Fatah's youth movement, which became the driving force behind the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s. Dahlan served numerous times in Israeli prisons between 1981 and 1986, during which he learned to speak fluent Hebrew.

He was deported by Israel to Jordan and eventually reached Tunis, where Yasser Arafat headed the PLO headquarters. Dahlan continued to orchestrate protests from exile in Tunis, where he won Arafat's confidence. He returned to Gaza in 1994 following the Oslo accords, was put in charge of the Preventive Security Service and also took command of Arafat's Fatah movement in Gaza. The control of two strong organisations made Dahlan one of the strongest officials in the Palestinian Authority.

Dahlan was a regular member of the Palestinian negotiating teams with Israel and he participated in the Camp David summit in 2000.

Dahlan has supported calls for reforming the Palestinian Authority, and resigned his post as security chief on June 5 2002 over disagreements with Yasser Arafat regarding PA reform. However, he was offered a job as Arafat's security advisor instead. Dahlan had been critical of Arafat's handling of the uprising.

In April 2003, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the first Palestinian Prime Minister, appointed Dahlan to the post of Minister of State and Security Affairs in his cabinet. However, after Abu Mazen's resignation in September 2003, Dahlan was denied a position in the cabinet of Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala). Dahlan, however, was appointed as minister of civil affairs in the latest Palestinian cabinet established in February 2005.


(Sources: BBC Online, PNA website)

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