Saeb Muhammad Salih Erekat (also Erakat or Arekat; Arabic: صائب عريقات‎ Ṣāʼib ʻUrayqāt or ʻRēqāt, born April 28, 1955, in Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem, was the Palestinian chief of the PLO Steering and Monitoring Committee until 12 February 2011. He negotiated the Oslo Accords with Israel and remained chief negotiator from 1995 until May 2003, when he resigned in protest from the Palestinian government. He later reconciled with the party and was re-appointed to the post in September 2003.

Saeb Erekat was born on April 28, 1955 in Abu Dis East Jerusalem, then under Jordanian rule. Erekat is one of seven children, with his brothers and sisters living outside of Israel or the Palestinian Territories. Erekat received a BA and MA in Political Science at San Francisco State University in the United States, and completed his Ph.D. in Peace and conflict studies at Bradford University, England. He is married with twin daughters and two sons.

On 8 May 2012 he was hospitalized in Ramallah after suffering a heart attack.

Mariane van Neyenhoff Pearl (born 23 July 1967) is a French freelance journalist and a reporter and columnist for Glamour magazine. She is the widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002.

Pearl was born in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France, to a Dutch father and a Cuban mother of Afro-Chinese-Cuban descent; her paternal grandfather was a Dutch Jewish diamond merchant. She was raised in Paris and met Daniel Pearl while he was on assignment there.

They married in August 1999, lived for a time in Mumbai, India, where Daniel was the South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, and later traveled to Karachi, Pakistan, to cover aspects of the War on Terrorism. Their son Adam Daniel was born in Paris three months after his father died.

Pearl's memoir, A Mighty Heart, which deals with the events surrounding her husband's kidnapping and murder, was adapted for the film A Mighty Heart. Co-produced by Brad Pitt, Andrew Eaton and Dede Gardner and directed by Michael Winterbottom, the film stars Angelina Jolie and Dan Futterman as Mariane and Daniel Pearl.