Fourteen new leaders, most of them from the young generation, joined the 18-member Fatah central committee, according to the initial voting result released on Tuesday morning.

Eleven candidates have been confirmed to be winners and three others are still waiting a confirmation at a final tally.

The following is the introduction of 11 new leaders.

Mohammed Ighniem, a main Fatah leader, is better known as Abu Maher Ghunim. He preserved his seat in the central committee and gained the largest number of 1,338 ballots among the more than 2,000 votes.

He used to be exiled until Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas obtained a permission from Israel to let Ghunim in the West Bank to join the general convention. He returned last month and plans to stay in the Palestinian territories. He is widely considered as possible Abbas' successor in the future.

Mahmoud al-Aloul, who won 1,112 votes after Ghunim, used to be Nablus city governor since 1995 and now he is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).

Marwan al-Barghouthi, an outspoken young Fatah leader, was born in 1958 near the West Bank city of Ramallah. He has been serving since 2004 a life sentence in an Israeli prison until now for charges of planning attacks aimed to kill Israelis. However, he denies the accusations.

Mohammed Dahlan, a former security chief who fled the Gaza Strip when Islamic Hamas movement seized the territory in 2007, is seen as Hamas' bitter foe. The Islamic movement said it can not deal with Dahlan under any position.

He was behind the crackdown the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) launched against Hamas in Gaza in the mid-1990s and Hamas blames him for plotting a coup against it after the Islamic movement won the parliamentary elections in 2006.

Two other former security chiefs from the West Bank won seats in Fatah's highest body, Tawfiq al-Tirawi, the general intelligence chief and Jebril al-Rejoub, Dahlan's former counterpart in the West Bank who now heads the Palestinian Football Federation (PFF).

Saeb Erekat, a Fatah lawmaker and a veteran peace negotiator, joined almost every Palestinian mission to negotiate with Israel due to his position as head of the negotiation affairs in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

Nasser al-Qudwa, born in Gaza in 1959, is the nephew of Yasser Arafat, the late Fatah founder and former president of PNA. Al-Qudwa served as Palestinian envoy in the United Nations and foreign affairs minister until Hamas won the elections in 2006.

Hussein al-Sheikh, is the director of civil liaison agency which coordinates between the PNA and Israel over civilian interests and daily life events.

Azzam al-Ahmad, chief of Fatah bloc in the Palestinian parliament and leader of Fatah delegation to reconciliation talks with Islamic Hamas movement.

Sultan Abu el-Einein, representative of Fatah in Lebanon, is the only central committee member based outside the Palestinian territories.

(Xinhua News Agency August 12, 2009)