( AP ) - A former Palestinian negotiator, leading Palestinian nationalist and physician, Haidar Abdel Shafi, died Tuesday in the Gaza Strip. He was 88.
Shafi died at his home in Gaza City of stomach cancer, said his son Khaled.
The charismatic, lanky gadfly to the late Yasser Arafat was most known internationally for leading the Palestinian team with Jordan to the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 and to peace talks in Washington in the two years following.
Shafi resigned his negotiating post in 1993 over the Oslo peace agreements with Israel, predicting that the process would collapse over the failure of the deals to tackle the issue of Jewish settlements on land Palestinians want for a state.
A final peace agreement has eluded the sides since and, in fighting that broke out in 2000, nearly 4,500 Palestinians and more than 1,100 Israelis have been killed.
Shafi was known as a die-hard critic of Arafat and his concessions to the Israelis in peace talks.
In 1996, Shafi, a lawmaker at the time, walked out of a meeting of the Palestinian legislature to protest Arafat's decision to amend the charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization to recognize Israel when the Jewish state did not give the Palestinians independence. He resigned from the legislature in 1998, saying it did not have enough teeth to effect real change.
Shafi was born in the Gaza Strip in 1919 and studied medicine at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon. It was there that he began his political activity with Arab nationalists aiming to establish a Palestinian state. He returned to the Gaza Strip and, during fighting that led to Israel's founding in 1948, helped facilitate medical care for tens of thousands of Palestinians who fled the hostilities. In the early 1950s he studied surgery at the Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.
Shafi began his political service to his people in the early 1960s and in 1964 was a member of the first all-Palestinian conference that established the PLO in Jerusalem. By 1966 he was the leading PLO figure in the Gaza Strip and was detained and deported by Israel when its forces occupied the coastal territory in 1967. In 1971 he returned to Gaza and a year later founded the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, a role that earned him great respect among Gazans.
Shafi's funeral was slated to take place Tuesday in Gaza City. He is survived by his wife, four children and eight grandchildren.