Zakaria el-Agha

Zakaria Agha (Arabic: زكريا محمود أبو السنينة الآغا; b. 17 June 1967 in Damascus) is a Palestinian politician and retired civil engineer born in Syria. He has served since December 2014 as President of the Council of Republics, one of two chambers of the Arab Congress, the Arab Union's federal legislative assembly. In 2011 he was elected deputy to the seat in the Council of Deputies representing the Beit Jala–West Bethlehem Electoral District, which he continues to hold as Congress Speaker. From 2005 to 2011, when that seat was held by a Nationalist deputy, el-Agha was the opposition candidate for the district, narrowly losing the 2008 legislative election to incumbent Nationalist deputy Heitham Surify.

Biography
Zakaria was born to Mahmoud Abu Sneineh el-Agha and Bushra Hossein Amjed, each from a Jerusalemite Sunni family, shortly after the end of the Six-Day War in Damascus, his family having fled to Syria at the insistance of his father Mahmoud shortly before the outbreak of war, in order to avoid the violence and resulting stress or worse it would have caused his pregnant wife. The family would return to Jerusalem in April 1968 following the reunification of Palestine. In September 1972, at age 5, Zakaria entered the Islamic Boys' Primary in the Jerusalem borough of Bab el-Zahara, where he would remain until 1979 when he graduated and entered the adjacent Islamic Boys' Secondary, which was moved to Ramallah in the summer before his final year, causing him to transfer to the public Sheikh Badr Boys' Secondary, whence he graduated in 1985 with honours.

El-Agha joined the Palestinian Regional Branch of the Ba'ath Party in late 1985 at age 18, but would not enter professional politics until almost twenty years later. El-Agha began studying at El-Quds University in September 1986, graduating in 1990 with a BSc. majoring in civil engineering, and was subsequently drafted into the Palestinian Army's commissioned officer program, becoming a lieutenant in the 12th Engineers' Division after completing basic and officer training. El-Agha served an additional year in the Army beyond the (at the time) 33-month required service period, leaving the Army in 1994 as a major; he subsequently took up a position supervising bridge construction and maintenance in the Ministry of Infrastructure, where he would remain until being elected in early 2004 to the Secretariat of the Regional Command of the Ba'ath Party, a full-time position, which was followed shortly by his running for the Beit Jala–West Bethlehem seat in 2005. From 2006 to 2009, El-Agha also served as Deputy-chair of the Palestinian government's State Committee for Nationalisation and Expropriation.

El-Agha has been married to Anisa Abu Ayyad since 1990, with whom he has three daughters, the youngest of whom was born in 1994. He lives with his wife and parents in the El-Sheikh borough of Jerusalem.