Ramallah - Fatah is the Arabic acronym for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filistinieh (Palestinian liberation movement).

Yasser Arafat founded the movement in 1958, when he was a student in Cairo. The goal of the new movement was the liberation of what had been the territory of Palestine from Israel.

On January 1, 1965 the movement launched its first attack against Israel, from a base in Jordan which at the time ruled the West Bank.

Support for the movement grew following the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as thousands of Palestinians and Arabs joined Fatah to fight Israel, which now controlled the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well.

Arafat was named chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968 and Fatah became the dominant force in the PLO, which set up its bases in Jordan.

Fatah suffered a serious blow in 1970 when King Hussein of Jordan unleashed his army against the movement, killing senior Fatah leaders and pushing the organization out of Jordan once and for all.

Arafat and his forces then moved to Lebanon where they set up bases, but in 1982 the Israeli army moved against the PLO forces there, forcing them to evacuate to Tunisia. There, Arafat had his headquarters until his 1994 return to the Palestinian territories after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo interim peace accords.

Arafat and Fatah remained the dominant force in the newly founded Palestinian Authority, established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, until the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, which were won by the organization's main rival, the Islamic Hamas movement.

Arafat, the Fatah founder and the icon of the Palestinian quest for independence, died in November 2004. Mahmoud Abbas succeeded him as Fatah leader and Palestinian President.

Fatah received a further blow in June 2007 when Hamas militias in Gaza defeated its loyalists to seize control of the Gaza Strip. (dpa)