Haidar Abdel-Shafi

Haidar Abdel-Shafi (Heidar Abdul-Shafi) (Arabic: حيدر عبد الشافي‎‎ June 10, 1919 - September 25, 2007), was a Palestinian physician, community leader and political leader who was the head of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference of 1991.

Abdel-Shafi was born in Gaza, one of six children of Sheikh Muheiddin Abdel-Shafi, head of the Higher Islamic Council Waqf and custodian of the holy places in Gaza and Hebron (from 1925–27). He attended primary school in Gaza; secondary education as a boarder at the Arab College in Jerusalem and graduated in 1936. He graduated in 1943 from the American University of Beirut College of Medicine in Beirut. At the University he joined George Habash's Arab Nationalist Movement dedicated to Arab nationalism and the "liberation of Palestine".

Abdel-Shafi worked at the British Mandate of Palestine's Municipal Hospital in Jaffa. In 1944-1945 he joined the Desert Army of the British Jordanian Army, then part of a new British Ninth Army intended to open a second front - which never materialized - in the Balkans. Spent the war instead in various locations in Palestine: Al-Azraq, Ashona, Jericho, Gaza, and resigned his commission at the war's end. He returned to Gaza and entered private medical practice. He then co-founded a branch of the Palestine Medical Society in 1945, and participated in the first Palestine Medical Congress in 1946.

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