The Palm Beach Post · West Palm Beach, Florida · 18 September 1988
CP-1988-039
Islamic zealots threaten PLO’s ‘unified leadership’
New York Times News Service, Jerusalem
Transcribed from the clipping
“JERUSALEM — In the first serious split of the 9-month-old Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories, an emerging Islamic fundamentalist organization is challenging the protest’s clandestine ‘unified leadership.’
The Islamic fundamentalists, who promote an uncompromising war with Israel and are critical of the Palestine Liberation Organization, have held three days of general strikes in the past month independent of those called by the underground leadership’s leaflets, and there have been several street fights between supporters of the two groups over whether merchants should open or close.
The emergence of the new organization, known as Hamas (or Zeal), an acronym for the Movement of the Islamic Resistance, not only poses a threat to the secular, PLO-oriented leadership of the uprising but has also complicated the efforts of several West Bank leaders to press Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership abroad to capitalize on their political gains by offering to come to terms with Israel… The underground leadership attacked the fundamentalist group by name for the first time in leaflet No.
25, now circulating on the streets. Hamas has become a major force in the Gaza Strip. Only a little over two years ago, rivalries in the Gaza Strip were so great that Islamic fundamentalists severely beat several members of leftist PLO groups with iron pipes and set fire to an office of the Palestinian Red Crescent.
Its influence is still spotty in the West Bank, where many of the organizers are loyal to the PLO. But Palestinians said that its protest calls were likely to be heeded in traditionalist Moslem areas such as Hebron.”
Context added by this archive
Nine months into the uprising, Hamas is reported as a threat to the people leading it. The underground leadership attacks it by name for the first time in leaflet number twenty-five.
Cite this clipping
"Islamic zealots threaten PLO’s ‘unified leadership’," The Palm Beach Post, 18 September 1988, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-039. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-039
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1988-039.
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