The Palestine Center mourns the death of Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi, a Palestinian intellectual, leading nationalist figure and surgeon. Dr. Abdel Shafi passed away Tuesday, 25 September 2007 in Gaza City after a long battle with cancer. He was 88 years old.

Internationally, he was best known for heading the Palestinian delegation with Jordan to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference and to peace talks in Washington for the following two years. To Palestinians, he had been a leading political, medical and civil leader since the early 1960s. In 1964, he was a member of the first all-Palestinian conference that established the PLO in Jerusalem. By 1966 he was the leading PLO figure in the Gaza Strip and was detained and deported by Israel when its forces occupied the coastal territory in 1967. In 1971 he returned to Gaza and a year later founded the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, a role that earned him great respect among Gazans.

Born in Gaza in 1919, he studied medicine at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon. It was there that he began his political activity with Arab nationalists aiming to establish a Palestinian state. He returned to the Gaza Strip and, during the violence that lead to Israel's creation in 1948, helped facilitate medical care for tens of thousands of Palestinians who were forced to flee the hostilities. In the early 1950s he studied surgery at the Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.

Shafi resigned his negotiating post in 1993 over the Oslo peace agreements with Israel, predicting that the process would collapse over the failure of the deals to tackle the issue of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. In 1996, he was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council but resigned two years later.

"Today, the Palestinian people lost a dedicated and honest leader, a great surgeon and visionary" said Dr. Subhi Ali, chairman of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development. "It is truly an end of an era."

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