George Habash
Khaled was born in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, to Arab parents. Her family fled to Lebanon on 13 April 1948 as part of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, leaving her father behind. At the age of 15, following in the footsteps of her brother, she joined the pan-Arab Arab Nationalist Movement, originally established in the late-1940s by George Habash, then a medical student at the American University of Beirut. The Palestinian branch of this movement became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after the 1967 Six-Day War.