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Ahmed Ali Mohammed Qurei (or Qureia) (Arabic: Ahmad ʿAli Muhammad Quray) (b. March 26, 1937, Abu Dis [near Jerusalem], Mandatory Palestine – d. February 22, 2023, Ramallah, West Bank, Claimed Territory of the State of Palestine), also known by his Arabic name kunya Abu Alaa (Arabic: Abu ʿAlaʾ), was a Palestinian politician who served as the second Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority.
First appointed to the position in October 2003, he tendered his resignation on January 26, 2006, following the defeat of the Fatah party in the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, and remained in office in a caretaker capacity until February 19 when he was succeeded by Ismail Haniyeh. During his tenure as prime minister, he also had responsibility for security matters. He previously served as speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and held a variety of significant positions within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from the 1970s onward.
Qurei was born in Abu Dis (near Jerusalem), Mandatory Palestine, in 1937. He joined the Fatah faction, the largest of the political and military organizations making up the Palestine Liberation Organization, in 1968. As a banker, he used his expertise during the 1970s as the director of the PLO's foreign investment branch and director-general of the PLO's economic branch, helping to make the organization one of the largest employers in Lebanon. He followed Yasser Arafat to Tunis after the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon. As more senior leaders died, Qurei rose to prominence and was elected to the Central Committee of Fatah in August 1989.
As a member of the Central Committee, Qurei was instrumental in negotiating the Oslo Accords (1993). He also founded and became director of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR) in 1993 to help garner money from international donors. He held various posts in the first Palestinian Authority cabinets including Minister of Economy & Trade and Minister of Industry. He was also responsible for a development plan for the Palestinian territories submitted to the World Bank in 1993.
Qurei was elected as the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council on March 7, 1996, in Gaza.
Later, he took part in the 2000 Camp David Summit with Ehud Barak. Soon after, he was re-elected to the PLC as a speaker in March 2001.
After the resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on September 6, 2003, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat nominated Qurei for the post of prime minister. Qurei accepted the nomination for the post in an "emergency government" on September 10. The next day, the Israeli government, apparently in response to bombings two days earlier, released a statement, announcing the decision that President Arafat would be "removed." Qurei decided upon that announcement to form a full government rather than a trimmed one.
On October 5, 2003, Qurei was appointed prime minister by presidential decree, and an eight-member emergency government was sworn in on October 7. However, Qurei could not form a new cabinet because of a dispute with Arafat which lasted for 10 weeks over the choice of an interior minister and control of the Palestinian Security Services, and he threatened to resign. While the Fatah Central Committee had agreed to the emergency cabinet with Qurei as caretaker prime minister, the Fatah-dominated PLC refused to hold a vote of confidence. The emergency cabinet's term expired on November 4 but Arafat asked Qurei to remain in office despite their dispute, and the PLC approved a new 24-member government on November 12. Among Qurei's top priorities was negotiating and meeting the Road Map for Peace plan with Israel. Israel's non-compliance and the United States not having done enough to enforce Israeli compliance with the peace plan, along with a lack of internal support, had been reasons for Abbas' earlier resignation.
On July 17, 2004, Qurei submitted his resignation amid growing chaos in the Gaza Strip. Offices of the Palestinian authority in Gaza were burned down, and gunmen briefly abducted four French aid workers, the police chief and another official, demanding reforms. Arafat refused to accept Qurei's resignation. Arafat and Qurei disputed on Qurei's demand for more authority to restructure the security forces to reduce the growing turmoil. President Arafat decreed a State of Emergency in Gaza. On July 27, Arafat and Qurei held a press conference after reaching a settlement in a cabinet meeting. Qurei had retracted his resignation.
After Arafat's death in November 2004 and Mahmoud Abbas' subsequent victory in the Palestinian presidential election of 2005, Qurei was asked to continue in his post and form a new cabinet. Due to repeated demands by the Fatah officials and PLC members to make the new cabinet more reform-minded, the vote of confidence was repeatedly delayed. It was finally passed on February 24, 2005, after Qurei had revised the list of ministers to accommodate these demands.
On December 15, 2005, Qurei briefly resigned his prime ministership post to run for a seat in the Palestinian Parliament, but he returned to office nine days later after deciding not to run. On January 26, 2006, Qurei announced his intention to resign following the Fatah party's defeat by Hamas in the parliamentary elections. At the request of PNA President, Mahmoud Abbas, Qurei remained in office in a caretaker capacity until being replaced by Ismail Haniyeh.
In 2004, Qurei said that if Israel failed to conclude an agreement with the Palestinians, that the Palestinians would pursue a single, bi-national state. During the Sixth Fatah conference in August 2009, he failed to get re-elected to the Fatah Central Committee. In 2012, in an article in Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, Ahmed Qurei called for Palestinians to reconsider a one-state instead of a two-state solution. He blamed Israel for "burying" or "decapitating" the two-state solution through the building of settlements.
Qurei died on February 22, 2023, in Ramallah in the West Bank. He was 85 years old.
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Ahmed Qurei, Former Palestinian Premier and Peace Envoy, Dies at 86
A member of the old guard of Palestinian leaders, Mr. Qurei was a principal architect of the Oslo Accords, the first peace agreement with Israel.
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JERUSALEM — Ahmed Qurei, a former Palestinian prime minister and negotiator who helped conceive and nurture the Oslo Accords, the interim peace agreements reached between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel in the 1990s, died on Wednesday in Ramallah, in the West Bank. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, a longtime comrade — and sometimes rival — who eulogized Mr. Qurei as a “solid fighter” who devoted his life to defending the Palestinian people and cause. Mr. Qurei’s longtime chief of staff, Salah Elayan, said that he died of an infection at a hospital and that he had suffered from heart problems.
Mr. Qurei (pronounced kuh-RAY) was a member of the dwindling Palestinian old guard — activists who joined Yasir Arafat and his secular Fatah movement, founded in exile in 1959, and who strived to put the Palestinian cause on the world agenda, whether through diplomacy or armed struggle.
In late 1992, while on a working visit to London, Mr. Qurei met with an Israeli academic, Yair Hirschfeld, who had asked to see him. At the time it was technically illegal for Israelis to meet with P.L.O. officials, but the meeting led to secret talks in Norway sanctioned by Israeli officials, with Mr. Qurei acting as the lead negotiator for the Palestinian side.
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Those negotiations resulted in the Oslo Accords, the landmark agreements that included mutual recognition between the government of Israel, then led by Yitzhak Rabin, and the P.L.O., led by Mr. Arafat.
The accords also established the Palestinian Authority, an interim body formed to exercise limited Palestinian self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and paved the way for the Palestinian leadership to return to the occupied territories from exile.
The interim agreements were supposed to lead to a comprehensive, permanent deal by 1999. Although the Oslo Accords did not spell out that deal, the Palestinians envisioned an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem.
Mr. Qurei moved back to Abu Dis, the village on the eastern edge of Jerusalem where he was born, and set about helping to build the institutions of putative statehood.
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But the post-Oslo optimism quickly dissipated, and the establishment of a Palestinian state now seems as far away as ever. The Palestinians have had no formal peace negotiations with Israel since 2014, and the Palestinian polity is divided between the Palestinian Authority, which nominally administers parts of the West Bank, and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza. Support for the Palestinian Authority has eroded, with many Palestinians accusing it of corruption and of serving only Israel’s interests, and Israel now has a right-wing government that is not inclined to negotiate.
Mr. Qurei’s Israeli and American interlocutors remembered him as a trustworthy, creative, shrewd and often humorous negotiator.
“Together we’ve tried to bring peace to our peoples in an understanding that it’s our responsibility to make a better future to our children,” Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli minister and peace negotiator, wrote on Twitter after Mr. Qurei’s death.
Mr. Elayan, Mr. Qurei’s former chief of staff, said the Israelis “knew he was tough but liked him because you could reach an agreement with him,” adding that Mr. Qurei was able to persuade Mr. Arafat to see things his way.
Dennis Ross, a Middle East envoy and the chief peace negotiator in the administrations of presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, recalled Mr. Qurei as “someone who was engaging and often brilliant as a negotiator.”
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“He knew how to acknowledge Israeli concerns about security to gain acceptance of Palestinian needs,” Mr. Ross wrote in an email.
But at one critical juncture in the peace process, Mr. Qurei withdrew. In the summer of 2000, President Clinton hosted Mr. Arafat, Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel and their negotiating teams at Camp David in an ambitious attempt to reach a final agreement.
Mr. Clinton grew irate when Mr. Qurei, then the chief Palestinian negotiator, refused to produce a map showing what territorial compromise the Palestinians could accept. Mr. Clinton shouted at him, witnesses said, accusing him of negotiating in bad faith.
The president’s outburst left Mr. Qurei “dazed,” Martin Indyk, then the U.S. ambassador to Israel and a key member of the American team, recalled in his memoir, “Innocent Abroad” (2009).
“He was humiliated and deeply offended,” Mr. Indyk wrote, adding, “He withdrew from the negotiations and repaired to his bedroom, where he stayed in his pajamas for most of the rest of the summit.”
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The talks failed; a few weeks later, a Palestinian uprising began.
Ahmed Qurei was born in Abu Dis on Oct. 12, 1936, to Ali and Dawoudeyah Qurei. His father was a sheep farmer. Ahmed used to walk from his village to school in downtown East Jerusalem. He moved to Saudi Arabia in his 20s to work for the Arab Bank and stayed for several years.
He married Heyam Samman in 1961. She survives him, as do their five children — Ala, Amer, Manal, Esam and Mona — and 17 grandchildren.
In 1968, Mr. Qurei joined Fatah and moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where he established Samed, the economic arm of the P.L.O., the umbrella group for a disparate array of Palestinian political and militant factions. In Lebanon, Samed distributed cash to the families of Palestinians killed in attacks on Israel and set up manufacturing workshops to employ Palestinian refugees.
After Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Mr. Qurei and the rest of the P.L.O. leadership decamped to Tunis. There Mr. Qurei served as the director general of the P.L.O.’s Department of Economic Affairs and Planning.
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After his return to Abu Dis in the West Bank just beyond Jerusalem’s city limits, he was appointed minister of economy, trade and industry in the first Palestinian government. He became a lawmaker in the Palestinian Legislative Council after parliamentary elections in 1996 and served as its speaker until 2003, when he became prime minister, replacing Mr. Abbas, who had resigned over differences with Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Qurei, popularly known by his nickname, Abu Ala, also had his quarrels with Mr. Arafat and threatened to resign at least twice.
He finally did quit, along with his government, in 2006, shortly before Hamas beat Fatah in a landslide election, upending decades of Fatah domination of Palestinian politics. By then, Mr. Arafat was dead and Mr. Abbas had succeeded him as president of the Palestinian Authority.
Mr. Qurei had warned Mr. Abbas against holding the election, apparently fearful of a loss to Hamas. A year later, Hamas seized full control of Gaza. The Palestinians have not held parliamentary elections since.
In his later years, Mr. Qurei was surrounded by signs of dashed dreams and Palestinian disappointment.
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An unfinished Palestinian Parliament building in Abu Dis, on which construction was started in the 1990s, stands derelict. Abu Dis is now separated from Jerusalem by a high concrete wall, part of the security barrier that Israel erected in the early 2000s to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from reaching Israeli cities, now a gray testament to failure.
Mr. Ross recalled telling Mr. Qurei in 2000 that the parameters outlined by Mr. Clinton for a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal would not be pursued by the incoming Bush administration, and that the Palestinians would pay a more long-term price if Mr. Arafat rejected them.
Mr. Qurei shook his head sadly, Mr. Ross recounted, and said, “Then I’m afraid it could take another 50 years.”
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