Born in 1951 in Gaza to a refugee family from Jaffa; studied Mathematics at Birzeit and Medicine in Egypt (graduated 1981); trained as a doctor in Egypt and got inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood; returned to the disputed territories, practiced Medicine in Jerusalem, returned to Gaza and, together with Sheikh Odeh, founded the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine in the early 1980s; arrested and sentenced to one year in 1983, and to three years in 1986 for his political activities, then deported by Israel to South Lebanon in August 1988; relocated in Yarmouk refugee camp, outside Damascus; key player in setting up the National Alliance in Jan. 1994, a coalition of eight PLO groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas rejecting the Oslo process and the peace deal with Israel; said to have been behind some of the 1995 suicide bomb attacks in Israel; assassinated in Malta, apparently by Mossad agents, on October 26, 1995; his funeral in Damascus on November 1, 1995 was attended by some 40,000.