Reporter Dispatch · 5 September 1988
CP-1988-041
Group calls for ‘holy war’ against Israel
By Dan Fisher and Dan Williams, Los Angeles Times, Gaza, Israeli-Occupied Gaza Strip
Transcribed from the clipping
“GAZA, Israeli-Occupied Gaza Strip — Neither the Palestine Liberation Organization nor anyone else has the right to endorse Israeli rule over any part of historic Palestine, according to an underground ‘covenant’ produced by an influential Islamic fundamentalist group here.
The document, a copy of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, was apparently produced in answer to recent statements by PLO officials that they are preparing to implicitly recognize Israel as part of a move toward trying to create an adjacent Palestinian state.
Both Israeli and Palestinian nationalist sources described the declaration as a threat to the extraordinary unity that has been shown by West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians during their nearly 9-month-old anti-Israeli uprising.
By calling for ‘jihad,’ or holy war, as ‘the only solution to the Palestine problem,’ the covenant is seen as undermining support in the occupied territories for any moderate PLO political initiative… The movement, known by its Arabic acronym as HAMAS, enforced a full commercial strike in major West Bank towns against the wishes of the secular intifada leadership.
A few days later, a second HAMAS effort to enforce a strike set off scuffling in the West Bank town of Ramallah between secular and religious activists.”
Context added by this archive
The same Los Angeles Times dispatch as the covenant story, in a Westchester paper on the same day, with the dateline spelled out: Gaza, Israeli-Occupied Gaza Strip. The headline puts holy war in quotation marks and calls the authors a group.
Cite this clipping
"Group calls for ‘holy war’ against Israel," Reporter Dispatch, 5 September 1988, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-041. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-041
More from the 1980s
- Moderation Silenced by Israel RiotsThe Buffalo News · 3 January 1988
- Gaza Strip: the forgotten stepchildNorthwest Herald · 4 January 1988
- 'Iron Fist' Enslaves Gazans In Their LandThe Herald Sun · 6 January 1988
- Israel condemns U.N. vote on deportationsThe Birmingham News · 6 January 1988
- Israeli soldiers fire on protestersCarroll County Times · 6 January 1988
- Undaunted Palestinians resume violenceThe News & Observer · 6 January 1988
- All 527 clippings from the 1980s →
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-1988-041.
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