Pictures: The PLO’s struggle

As part of our special report PLO: History of a Revolution , Al Jazeera looks at images that tell the turbulent story of the Palestinian struggle for a national home.

In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was formed with the belief that armed struggle was the only way to win back a Palestinian homeland from Israel.

Over the next four and a half decades, the organisation found itself expelled first from Jordan, and then Lebanon, and under attack in Tunisia.

Despite international recognition of the organisation in 1974, it would be two more decades before Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s leader, would be allowed to return to the Palestinian territories.

An Israeli siege of Arafat’s headquarters in 2002, and the subsequent death of the icon of the Palestinian struggle two years later, marked a period of decline for the PLO – one it has yet to recover from.