George Habash
George Habash was born on August 1, 1926. See ranking, bio blurb, and everyone else born that day.
About George Habash
George Habash (1 August 1926 – 26 January 2008) was a Palestinian politician and physician who was the founder and first general-secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) from 1967 to 2000. Habash was born in Lydda, Mandatory Palestine, in 1926. In 1948, while he was a medical student at the American University of Beirut, he returned to his hometown of Lydda during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The city's Arab Palestinian population, including his family, was forcibly driven out in an event known as the Lydda Death March, which led to the death of his sister. In 1951, after graduating first in his class from medical school, Habash worked in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and ran a clinic in Amman. He later relocated to Syria and Lebanon. In 1967, after being sidelined in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) by Yasser Arafat, he founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist–Leninist group opposing the existence of Israel and advocating for a one-state solution in the entire region. In the 1970 Dawson's Field hijackings, Habash masterminded the hijackings of four Western airliners to Jordan, which led to the Black September conflict and his subsequent exile to Lebanon. Habash remained opposed to a two-state solution even after the PLO signed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993. He resigned as secretary-general of the PFLP due to ill health in 2000, dying of a heart attack in 2008. He was also known by his kunya as "al-Hakim" (Arabic: الحكيم, romanized: Al-Ḥakīm, lit. 'The Wise Man' or 'The Doctor').