A Guide to Palestinian and Other Anti-Israel Factions

The Middle East was thrown into turmoil on Saturday, when the Islamist militant group Hamas launched a full-scale attack on Israeli military and civilian targets across the Gaza border. Israel responded by officially declaring a state of war, carrying out hundreds of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, and declaring a siege on the Hamas-controlled territory.

More than 1,000 Israelis and 900 Palestinians have been killed thus far, with thousands more wounded on both sides. Hamas currently has an estimated 150 Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as numerous U.S. and Thai citizens held hostage and has pledged to kill one hostage every time an Israeli airstrike hits Gazans “in their homes without warning.” And the death toll is expected to rise. 

The attack has dramatically escalated one of the world’s most enduring conflicts. Hamas carried out Saturday’s assault, but it is not the only group vying to lead the Palestinians or the fight against Israel. Here are the major players you need to know:

Hamas

Hamas is a Sunni Islamist political organization that serves as the de facto government of the Gaza Strip, overseeing the lives of more than 2 million people. It does not recognize Israel and advocates using armed resistance against it, including through Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades; Hamas has long been the primary force behind many terrorist attacks and missile barrages against Israel, including this weekend’s assault.

Hamas was founded in 1987 following the start of the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, as a Palestinian offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist social and political movement. The name Hamas is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (or Islamic Resistance Movement). In addition to being a militant organization, Hamas is also one of the two main Palestinian political parties. Its rival party, Fatah, dominates the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank in an uneasy partnership with the occupying force there, Israel. Unlike Hamas, Fatah has formally renounced the use of violence against Israel.

In 2005, Israel withdrew all of its forces from the Gaza Strip. A year later, Hamas beat Fatah in a landslide win in Palestinian legislative elections; a rift between the two parties followed, and Hamas eventually drove Fatah out of the Gaza Strip entirely, gaining full control of Gaza by 2007.

Numerous Western nations and entities—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union—label Hamas or its military wing a terrorist organization, and Egypt helps Israel maintain a blockade on Gaza that has been in place for 16 years, restricting the movement of goods and people into and out of the territory. 

Other nations provide varying degrees of support to Hamas. The biggest of these is Iran, which has long provided funding, weapons, and training to Hamas fighters. Recent statements by Hamas officials allege that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) provided the militant group with foreign weapons, technology, and training to aid its latest assault, though the White House has so far said it does not have specific evidence that Iran was directly involved in the assault. 

Qatar also has ties to Hamas; the group’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, runs the organization from Doha, where he lives. Some of the group’s leaders also reportedly have offices in Turkey. The Lebanon-based Shiite militant organization Hezbollah is also a longtime ally of Hamas in the fight against Israel, despite the two groups’ religious and ideological differences. 

Fatah

A reverse acronym for the Arabic translation of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Fatah is the biggest secular Palestinian political party and the driving force behind the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. The party was formed in 1959 by Palestinian diaspora activists, including former President Yasser Arafat and current President Mahmoud Abbas, just over a decade after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which displaced at least 750,000 Palestinians with the creation of Israel—referred to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” in Arabic. 

Initially opposing the Israeli government through guerrilla warfare tactics, Fatah began pursuing more diplomatic avenues of engagement in the 1980s that ultimately led to the Oslo Accords and the proposal of a two-state solution. Unlike Hamas, Fatah recognizes Israel and wants to build a two-state solution along the borders established after the 1967 Six-Day War. This would define the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as Palestine. 

Fatah, however, currently only controls the West Bank, having been forced out of Gaza by Hamas in 2007—a year after Hamas unexpectedly won legislative elections that were followed by violent clashes between the two parties. 

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FP Live

Palestine Liberation Organization

An umbrella organization created in 1964 and consisting of several political parties, the PLO represents the Palestinian people at the United Nations and in various other multilateral institutions. Although Fatah members maintain a majority in the organization, the PLO also includes other parties, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, its offshoot Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian People’s Party. 

Militant groups, such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are not part of the PLO and oppose its close relationship with the Palestinian Authority, which works with Israeli officials to maintain security in the West Bank. Although the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) is technically the PLO’s military branch, the PLA’s operations are run by host governments, not the PLO. Currently, the only nation actively hosting PLA forces is Syria, which has a long history of supporting militant Islamist objectives. 

Palestinian Authority

The Palestinian Authority came into being in 1994 following secret negotiations between the PLO and the Israeli government in Norway the previous year. Those negotiations led to the Oslo Accords, which established the framework for a two-state solution that would see the PA govern the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

In 1996, Arafat of the Fatah party was elected president of the PA, and he helmed both bodies until his death in 2004. He was succeeded by Abbas, another Fatah co-founder who continues to head the PLO and PA.

Many Palestinians distrust the PA, seeing it as an occupation collaborator because it coordinates with the Israel Defense Forces in maintaining security in the West Bank—a view its rival, Hamas, encourages. 

Palestinian Islamic Jihad

After Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is the second-largest Palestinian Islamist militant group active in the Gaza Strip. Like Hamas, it does not recognize Israel and violently opposes its occupation; however, although its interests align with those of Hamas and the two groups maintain ties, they are separate entities. PIJ, founded in 1981, receives support from Iran and Syria and actively works with Hezbollah, an Islamist militant group based in Lebanon.

Hamas and PIJ disagree on how best to fight for a Palestinian state. Because Hamas serves in a government capacity in Gaza, it requires public support to function effectively and thus must take the safety of civilians under its rule into consideration. In contrast, PIJ centers its entire strategy on armed resistance only. That has, at times, forced Hamas to help stop some PIJ campaigns. 

Hamas and PIJ also disagree on what end state they would accept; whereas some Hamas leaders have stated their willingness to accept a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders without recognizing Israeli statehood, PIJ rejects that condition and is committed to the destruction of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state that would include not just Gaza and the West Bank but Israel as well. 

On Monday, PIJ claimed responsibility for an operation in southern Lebanon against Israeli soldiers. The group’s leader, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, said in a statement on Sunday that his forces were holding 30 Israeli hostages.

Hezbollah

A powerful Shiite Islamist group in the region, Hezbollah, whose name in Arabic means “Party of God,” was created with Iranian support in Lebanon in 1982 primarily to counter invading Israeli forces. Since then, the group has carried out numerous attacks on Israeli and U.S. forces as well as civilians, including multiple bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, in the mid-1980s and a 2006 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that sparked a 34-day war with Israel. In 2000, Hezbollah succeeded in driving Israeli forces out of southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation. 

Hezbollah has long supported the Palestinian cause and called for the destruction of Israel. It is backed by Iran, with the IRGC using the militant organization as a conduit to spread its own ideology. Hezbollah also has close ties with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and intervened heavily in the Syrian civil war on the regime’s behalf. The organization has formidable military capabilities and experience, and it is seen as one of Israel’s most powerful enemies.  

Hezbollah has also accompanied its militancy with political participation for decades, having seen eight of its members elected to Lebanon’s parliament as early as 1992. As of this year, following national elections in 2022, the organization has 13 members in parliament. The group controls parts of Beirut, southern Lebanon, and much of the country’s Bekaa Valley region and has long exercised a de facto veto on Lebanese government policy. 

The United States, the U.K., the Arab League, and Germany all consider Hezbollah an international terrorist group, whereas the European Union has adopted that designation only for the organization’s military arm.

One of the biggest emerging questions this week is whether—and to what extent—Hezbollah will get involved, potentially opening up a second front in the war with Israel.