Born: July 13th, 1949
Died: February 18th, 2026
Her posting to Ireland in 1989 as the first woman to represent the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) or Palestine in an ambassadorial role was the start of a distinguished diplomatic career that saw Leila Shahid then posted to the Netherlands, to a long stint in France, and then the European Union in Brussels.
A passionate and eloquent defender of her people, their art and culture, she would become a recognised and admired figure in French public life.
She died on February 18th at 76, reportedly by her own hand, at her home in La Lèque in the south of France, unable to shake a long depression retriggered by the trauma of Gaza’s bloody destruction. She was the latest, her friends say, of its 76,000 victims.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas described Shahid as “a model of diplomacy committed to the values of freedom, justice and peace”. He said she “devoted her life to defending the Palestinian cause and was a genuine voice for Palestinian diplomacy”.
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Born in Beirut in 1949, a year after the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel, the Nakba, Shahid came from a well-to-do family of exiles long connected to the Palestinian national struggle.
The parents of Sirine Husseini, her mother, had been expelled from Palestine by the British in the late 1930s. Her great-grandfather served as mayor of Jerusalem from 1904 to 1909. Her father, Munib Shahid, originally from Saint-Jean-d’Acre in Israel, left to study medicine in the Lebanese capital before the Nakba.
At 18 Shahid abandoned what she later described as a “protected” bourgeois youth in Beirut to join the Palestine Liberation Organisation. She studied anthropology and psychology at the American University of Beirut, and worked in Palestinian refugee camps.
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Working on her doctorate in anthropology in Paris, she was elected president of the Union of Palestinian Students in France, and met Yasser Arafat, with whom she forged a lasting relationship. In 1989, after a decade in Morocco, she would agree reluctantly to be appointed by him briefly as the PLO representative to Ireland, as she told AFP, a “recognition of the role women have played in the Palestinian cause for 40 years”.
She would move to France in 1993, at a pivotal moment in the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the launch of the Oslo peace process, negotiated by Arafat and Israel’s Yitzakh Rabin, which she strongly supported and advocated for.
The PLO in 1988 had recognised Israel and renounced terrorism and saw the Oslo accords as a stepping stone towards a Palestinian state, although, to the fury of many Palestinians, the treaty made no mention of it. The accords also provided for security co-operation between Israel and the new Palestine Authority.
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Divisions in the Palestinian movement deepened, reinforcing Hamas’s position in Gaza, while Shahid remained solidly committed to compromise and reconciliation, and with Arafat.
Some years later, when at the EU mission – she had rejected a posting to the US, arguing that the relationship between the Arab world and Europe was key – she expressed support for Ireland’s passage of the Lisbon treaty referendum because it would “consolidate the political role of the EU in foreign affairs” and see the EU assert its political place in the quartet of Middle East peace brokers, along with the US, Russia and the UN.
She was denounced by the Irish Friends of Palestine group, which had been campaigning for a No vote, claiming the EU had been facilitating illegal Israeli actions against Palestinians, and had refused to impose sanctions on the Jewish state. Its spokesman questioned Shahid’s credentials to speak for the Palestinians, claiming she was part of the Arafat Fatah movement which were “hand in glove with the EU in this charade of a peace process”.
In France, Le Monde’s obituarist wrote: “Even though she was not blind to the flaws of the Oslo accords … she championed the ideal of reconciliation that underpinned them.”
“She offered a humanistic vision of the possible coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians,” recalled former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine.
She was among the first Palestinian diplomats to engage with Israeli peace advocates, and fought anti-Semitism, striving to bridge divides even as the broader conflict deepened.
In L’Humanite her friend Patrick le Hyaric wrote that “to listen to Leila was to hear a deep song that mixed history, geography, law poetry, anthropology and politics. Politics in its noble sense – as one would wish it to be.”
In 2015, the indefatigable ambassador retired. It was, in truth, one obituarist writes, “a disguised resignation. While she held great admiration for Arafat, she had little for his successor Mahmoud Abbas – an uninspiring apparatchik whom she blamed for having abandoned Gaza to the Hamas Islamists”.
She divided her time between her Beirut apartment, and her stone house in La Lèque.
She began working on a memoir but gave it up very quickly. Depression took over, and from October 2023, the footage of the war in Gaza made her suffering unbearable. She told France Info that “30 years after the Oslo accords, the situation is worse than ever”.
She is survived by her husband, the Moroccan author Mohammed Berrada, whom she married in 1977.
