The Palestine National Liberation Movement (Harakat at-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini), a secret organization, known from a reversal of its Arabic initials as Fatah (Arabic: "Conquest" or "Opening"), is founded in the late 1950s by Yasir 'Arafat, 29, and Khalil al-Wazir, 23, with the aim of wresting Palestine from Israeli control by waging low-intensity guerrilla warfare against the latter.

Al-Wazir, who takes the nom de guerre Abu Jihad, had fled from Ramla with his family during the 1948 war.

He grew up in the Gaza Strip, where he was educated by the UNRWA, and met 'Arafat in 1951 while attending college in Cairo.

'Arafat, a civil engineer whose wife is related to the anti-Zionist grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, had gone to Kuwait, where he worked as an engineer and set up his own contracting firm.