Arab Nationalist Movement
Abdel-Shafi was born in Gaza, one of six children of Sheikh Muheiddin Abdel-Shafi, head of the Higher Islamic Council Waqf and custodian of the holy places in Gaza and Hebron (from 1925–27). He attended primary school in Gaza; secondary education as a boarder at the Arab College in Jerusalem and graduated in 1936. He graduated in 1943 from the American University of Beirut College of Medicine in Beirut. At the University he joined George Habash's Arab Nationalist Movement dedicated to Arab nationalism and the "liberation of Palestine".