Yusef Urabi

Yusef Urabi (; also spelled Yusuf Orabi) was a Palestinian officer in the Syrian Army as well as an early member of Fatah's armed wing, al-Assifa. In 1966 he was killed in the Yarmouk Camp in Damascus during an attempt to ease tensions between Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat and Ahmed Jibril.

Military career Urabi served as a major for one of the regular Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) units within the Syrian Army. He sympathized with Ba'athism, an ideology promoting pan-Arabism and socialism and was a close military adviser and friend of Hafez al-Assad. Urabi enlisted with al-Assifa, the armed wing of Fatah, in the late 1950s.

Al-Assad, who was Defense Minister at the time, selected Urabi in 1966 to head the operations of Fatah—which was based in Syria—and instructed Yasser Arafat and other Fatah leaders to recognize Urabi's authority.

Death On 5 May 1966, during a meeting chaired by Urabi to alleviate tensions between Arafat and Ahmed Jibril in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Urabi was assassinated.

In contrast, according to Palestinian writer Said Aburish, Urabi was defenestrated from a third-floor window and died immediately. While Arafat was not present when Syrian police arrived to the crime scene, he had sought refuge in a Syrian police coronel house. He then pleaded President Jedid for protection, but was subsequently detained by police on al-Assad orders. Arafat and al-Wazir were moved to the Mezzah prison and kept in solitary confinement. Assad appointed a three-man jury to investigate the case, which found Arafat guilty, sentencing him to death. But finally Jedid released Arafat and closed the file.