Palestinian leader of the second intifada. Marwan joined Fatah, the principal Palestinian liberation movement at the age of 15. He was arrested in 1978 and spent the next 10 years in and out of Israeli prisons and in exile. He was elected to the Palestinian legislative Council in 1996 and became a leader of the second intifada and the Israelis convicted him, in 2002, of five counts of murder. He got himself educated in Israeli prisons and learned Hebrew. After his release, in 1983, he entered Birzeit University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Art's degree in history and political science, after 11 years of interrupted schooling, in 1994. He was awarded an MA in international relations from Birzeit in 1998. Marwan Barghouti was born in the village of Kobar, near Ramallah, in the West Bank.