Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Tayeb Abdul Rahim Mahmoud Abdul Halim was born in the town of Anabta in the Tulkarm Governorate in 1944. He is married and has three sons. His father was the poet Abdul Rahim Mahmoud, who was martyred in the Battle of the village of Al-Shajara in the Galilee during the Nakba events of 1948. He studied the primary and secondary stages in the schools of Anabta and Tulkarm, and completed a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Al-Azhar University in Egypt in 1967.
Abdul Rahim became involved in national activities in his early youth, becoming active in student work during his university studies. He was a leader in the General Union of Palestinian Students and joined the Fatah movement following the June 1967 setback. He completed a military course in Nanjing, China in 1967 and devoted himself to Fatah media work. He was an announcer on “Voice of the Storm,” a radio station supervised by Fatah and broadcasting from the studios of Voice of the Arabs Radio in Cairo for two hours daily. He then became its deputy director in 1969, and then its director between 1972 and 1977. He supervised its branches in more than one place, such as Daraa in Syria and Baghdad in Iraq. He was forced to move to the new radio station headquarters in Beirut after the Egyptian authorities closed its headquarters in Cairo following the October 1973 war for broadcasting a position opposing the ceasefire agreement between Egypt and the Zionists. He then rose through the ranks in the institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization and within the organizational structures of Fatah. He represented the organization in several countries, such as China in 1977, Egypt and Yugoslavia. He became a member of the National Council in 1977, a member of the Revolutionary Council of the Fatah movement in 1980, was appointed political commissioner of the Al-Asifa forces in 1983, and a representative of the Fatah movement in the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1989.
He returned to Palestine in 1994 and participated in the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its institutional structure, especially the media. He held high-ranking official positions within it, and was appointed ambassador to Jordan in 1995, and Secretary-General of Presidential Affairs in the Authority. He played a pivotal role in shaping the Authority's position on resistance movements, specifically Hamas and Islamic Jihad, at more than one juncture. He was part of the Authority's delegation formed by Yasser Arafat for dialogue with the factions in 1995. He participated in the first legislative elections in January 1996 on the Fatah list in the Tulkarm district and won. He became a member of the Legislative Council and headed a number of its committees. He was appointed head of the official fact-finding committee that investigated the corruption file in the Authority in June 1997. He took charge of Mahmoud Abbas's election campaign for the presidency of the Authority in 2005. He was appointed Secretary-General of the Palestinian Presidency again, and was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Fatah movement at its sixth conference held in Bethlehem in 2009.
He died in Egypt on March 18, 2020.
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