Hatem Qafisha
Palestinian politician

Hatem Qafisha (Arabic: حاتم قفيشة; born 1963) is a Palestinian politician. He is a current member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) representing Hebron Governorate. He is affiliated with the Hamas movement.
Biography
Qafisha was one of over 400 Hamas activists deported by Israel to Southern Lebanon in December 1992 for his membership in the organization. When he returned to the West Bank in 1993, he recorded his time in exile in a series of articles in the Al-Quds newspaper. He intended to publish a memoir, but Israeli prison guards confiscated his writings.
He campaigned for a seat in the PLC from his prison cell and was elected in January 2006. On November 6, 2007, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seized Qafisha from his home in Hebron as a part of series of arrests of Hamas members following the capturing of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by Palestinian militants. He was held in administrative detention in the Ketziot prison in the Negev Desert until his release on November 1, 2009. While in prison, Qafisha reportedly completed a PhD through correspondence courses.
“Hatem Qafisha” enters the record as palestinian politician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hatem, Qafisha and Palestinian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Hatem Qafisha” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hatem, Qafisha and Palestinian provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5681301. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1992, 1993 and 2006.
A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hatem Qafisha” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.