Hani al-Hassan

Hani al Hassan
Born	Hani al Hassan 1939 Haifa
Died	6 July 2012 (aged 73) Amman
Nationality	Palestinian
Occupation	Engineer
Years active	1950s-200s

Hani al Hassan (Arabic: هاني الحسن; l939 – 6 July 2012), also known as (Abu Tariq, Abu-l-Hasan), was a leader of the Fatah organization in Germany and member of the Palestinian Authority Cabinet and the Palestinian National Council.

He was born in Haifa in northern modern-day Israel in 1939. He is the younger brother of Khaled al-Hassan, one of founding members of Fatah. He spent time as a refugee in Yarmouk camp, near Damascus, where he organized an Islamist slate, Shabab al Aqsa, to compete in student elections. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in early 1950s. He went on to study engineering in the late 1950-60s in West Germany (Darmstadt and Munich), where he worked through the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) in Europe, and acted as Fatah’s main Europe link after he merged his own commando group to Fatah in 1963 until 1967. He also served as President of GUPS from 1962. He pursued Ph.D. studies in media in USSR.

Al Hassan returned to Gaza in 1995 and began to act as the head of Foreign Relations in Fatah and a political adviser to Arafat. He served as regional head in Jordan briefly in early 1970, then as Salah Khalaf’s deputy in Rasd, along with being a central committee leader during this time period. Beginning in 1974, he acted as a political aide to Yasser Arafat, an ambassador to Tehran, and became an ambassador to Amman in 1982. He retains good ties to the Gulf States. He became a member of Fatah-Central Committee in May 1980. He was critical of the leadership's stance towards Iraq after August 1991, and at Oslo, but returned to Gaza Strip in November 1995, and became the chief political adviser to Arafat as well as PLO-CC member & head of the Palestinian National Council foreign relations committee. He was appointed Interior Minister on 29 October 2002.

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