The Palestinian National Movement After 7 October: Assessments and Recommendations

Introduction

The crisis of the Palestinian national movement—characterized by fragmentation, institutional disintegration, and the absence of a credible strategic program—long predates the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack in southern Israel. As a direct result of developments on and since that date, however, a chronic condition has been exacerbated into an acute, potentially existential catastrophe.

What had been a protracted erosion of political cohesion has now become a moment of total disarray, exposing the movement’s inability to articulate a unified response to the unprecedented challenges confronting the Palestinian people. Rather than collectively formulating and pursuing a shared strategy to defend national rights and interests, the movement’s principal components have largely prioritized maintaining their own relevance and position.

While the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas continue to dominate the Palestinian political arena, this primarily reflects the absence of viable alternatives. If Palestinians are to achieve the objectives of self-determination and sovereignty in their homeland, a more coherent, representative, and effective national movement will need to emerge from the ruins of the present order.

To better understand the current Palestinian predicament and the national movement’s future prospects, this chapter examines the manifestations of the crisis before and since October 2023, and what these developments foreshadow for the future at this pivotal historical juncture.

Before the Catastrophe, A Crisis

Hamas’ attempt to integrate into the formal Palestinian political system, reflected in its decision to participate in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, decisively failed in 2007. Amid escalating tensions and violence with its political rival, Fatah, Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in June of that year, resulting in an enduring political and territorial schism between a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and a PA-dominated West Bank.

Thereafter, Hamas ruled Gaza—internally—as a hegemonic power, establishing full control over governance, the security sector, and increasingly the economy. In the absence of either national reconciliation or new elections, it was essentially accountable only to itself. At the same time, Hamas ruled in the long shadow of Israel’s punishing blockade and repeated military onslaughts, as well as unshakable international and regional isolation. Determined to function simultaneously as a governing power and an armed resistance movement, Hamas predictably failed to navigate the inherent contradictions, delivering convincingly on neither and presiding over an increasingly disillusioned population.

By 2018, Michael Lynk, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, at the time, concluded that “Gaza has become unlivable,”¹ citing an economy in free fall, 70 percent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water, and a collapsed health care system. Gaza’s economy relied on a combination of international aid, income generated by laborers permitted to work in Israel, and salary payments to PA employees transferred from Ramallah. By 2022, more than one-third of the population was food insecure,² and the territory was suffering a brain drain of its most talented youth.³ A 2020 study reported that 47 percent of Palestinians in Gaza felt so excluded that they saw “no room or margin for freedom.”⁴ On the eve of October 7, 2023, while Hamas’ grip on Gaza remained firm, pressure was mounting on the movement to deliver a breakthrough for the population trapped within its 365 square kilometers.⁵

Conditions in the West Bank were scarcely better. Mahmoud Abbas—president of the State of Palestine, chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and chairman of the Fatah Central Committee—was approaching 90 and governing under a mandate that expired in 2009. Increasingly unpopular, polls in June 2023 indicated that a majority of Palestinians wanted his resignation and new elections to be held.⁶

Following the 2007 rupture with Hamas, Abbas suspended the PA’s parliament and began ruling by decree.⁷ He continued to consolidate power by hollowing out Palestinian institutions, including his own Fatah movement, rendering them largely ineffective. The PLO Executive Committee was restructured to ensure Abbas’ absolute control over its members and decisions, while similar measures within the Fatah Central Committee prompted prominent members to resign in protest at their marginalization.⁸

As Abbas established an unfettered grip on power, unions and syndicates that once held significant sway within the PLO and PA were reduced to endorsing executive decisions, while the PA judiciary was similarly subordinated to the presidency.⁹ If Gaza was ruled internally by a single party, the PA-controlled West Bank was ruled by one man. Yet even Abbas’s efforts to demonstrate his reliability as a negotiating partner yielded little from Israel, which consistently slighted his overtures and lost no opportunity to weaken the PA and further damage its stature.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian leftist movements—including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Palestine People’s Party (PPP)—were reduced to a symbolic presence within the Palestinian political arena. Formerly influential, they became dependent on the goodwill of the PA and Hamas, functioning primarily as ornaments that enabled the latter two to claim national consensus for their decisions.

By October 2023, Palestinians lacked not only a credible national movement but also a realistic pathway out of their predicament. Fragmented politically, geographically, and increasingly economically, the ensuing crisis would place what remained of their political system under unprecedented strain.

After October 7 – The Unraveling

The October 2023 attack erupted in the context of a prolonged political paralysis, but it also exposed a broader regional and international setting that was highly unfavorable, if not outright antagonistic, to Palestinian rights.

Israel’s genocidal military campaign brought Western complicity and hypocrisy into sharp focus.¹⁰ It also revealed the inability of regional governments to confront or deter Israel from exercising unprecedented military force in Palestine and across the region, or leverage diplomacy to the same effect. Despite groundbreaking support for the Palestinian people in international public opinion, as well as from numerous governments in the Global South, there was little direct impact on the course of events.

Confronted with these realities, the Palestinians urgently required a unified political posture. Tragically, the genocide instead revealed the breadth and depth of decay and debilitation of the Palestinian national movement.

PLO-PA

In the wake of October 7, the PLO Executive Committee, the supreme executive institution of the Palestinian political system, failed to take the initiative and put forward a clearly articulated position. In what can be characterized as an abdication of responsibility, it instead issued a series of bland statements that demonstrated its failure to recognize the existential threat facing the Palestinian people, including those in the West Bank, and ultimately the Palestinian political system itself.

Fatah and the other constituent factions of the PLO have had only rhetoric on offer, including statements expressing frustration with the leadership they are theoretically part of. When Mahmoud Abbas summoned the PLO Central Council in April 2025 to anoint one of Fatah’s most controversial and unpopular leaders, Hussein Al-Sheikh, as his deputy and heir-apparent, the factions duly rubber-stamped the move, demonstrating they had become inconsequential and their role performative.

Exploiting this weakness, Western governments demanded a series of PA reforms that further debilitated the Palestinian political system and subordinated its policies to U.S. and European priorities.¹¹ These included enhanced security cooperation with Israel to crack down on Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank. The PA obliged, killing a number of Palestinians in the process, and further eroding what popular credibility it still had.

In a further response to Western demands, Abbas appointed a new government amid the genocide. Among the reforms adopted was putting an end to the social security safety net for the families of Palestinian prisoners, which abandoned thousands of vulnerable families.¹²

Nevertheless, such efforts were not reciprocated and failed to generate either an enhanced role for the PA or Western pressure upon Israel to modify policies explicitly designed to weaken it. Ultimately, U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan, unveiled in late 2025, not only excluded the PA from any role in the Gaza Strip pending the completion of a comprehensive yet unspecified reform program, but it also pointedly relegated Palestinian rights to the realm of aspirations that might—or might not—be placed on the agenda at some indeterminate point in the future.

Currently, the PA remains on political and financial life support, unable to meet its payroll obligations or serve its people as envisioned when it was established in 1994. It has maintained security cooperation with Israel and failed to confront the unprecedented escalation in settler attacks and military attacks, which have forcibly displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians and erased entire communities. In short, the PA’s actions are governed by fear—both of alienating the existing nominal Western engagement and of provoking an Israeli response that would place the PA’s very survival at risk.

Although Western governments remain invested in forestalling the PA’s collapse, their policies are falling short of bolstering its legitimacy and authority. Indeed, at a time when Palestinian unity is perhaps the most urgent national imperative, many governments that formally recognized the State of Palestine in 2025 made their announcements conditional on Abbas’s pledge to exclude Hamas from the Palestinian political system and prohibit it from participation in future elections. This approach was reinforced in November 2025, when the PA imposed a new municipal elections law barring any party list that has not formally accepted the PLO’s political program and its international obligations—effectively, its agreements with Israel.¹³

The political suffocation of the West Bank is now nearly complete. Ordinary Palestinians, political factions, unions, and civil society organizations have been successfully subdued at precisely the moment when their contributions are most needed for political and organizational reconstruction. Crushed by the occupation’s brutal policies and abandoned by their government, Palestinians are consumed by their own struggle for survival. As a result, their response to the genocide in the Gaza Strip has been notably muted.

Hamas

The unilateral decision taken by Hamas to launch an unprecedented attack on Israel, at a time of deepening crisis within the Palestinian national movement, has proven catastrophic for not only the movement but the Palestinian people more broadly. In contrast to the planning that went into the attack, Hamas and its allies in the Palestinian national movement demonstrated little understanding of the depth and breadth of the political and humanitarian fallout of their actions. Nowhere was this more severe than in the Gaza Strip, whose residents were effectively left to fend for themselves as Israel unleashed a campaign of mass killing and destruction exceeding anything it had previously carried out.

Although severely weakened, Hamas remains the dominant Palestinian force in Gaza. It survived more than two years of bombardment and ground invasion and, despite the assassination of most of its senior commanders and personnel, preserved its core military, security, and civilian structures. In areas vacated by Israeli forces, those structures have proven capable of resuming operations, while expressions of popular discontent and opposition—where they emerged—have been swiftly suppressed.

Politically, Hamas tried to leverage its central role in the crisis to gain the international recognition it has long sought, although such efforts were devoid of a deeper political vision that meets the Palestinians’ aspirations for self-determination. On the one hand, Hamas successfully displaced the PLO as the main Palestinian interlocutor in negotiations to bring the war to an end, and in early 2025, the United States commenced direct discussions with its leadership.¹⁴ At the same time, Hamas’s disarmament and permanent exclusion from governance—effectively its dismantlement—has become a point of consensus among Western governments.

In November 2025, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 formalized these demands at the international level. In effect, Hamas is required to negotiate its own demise as a condition for ending the genocide.

While Hamas has conditionally endorsed governing structures from which it will be excluded, it has thus far rejected total disarmament, though suggesting it may be open to the decommissioning of its heavy weaponry. In practice, this may leave the movement in power even as it relinquishes formal rule. For these and other reasons, Israel may well seize upon the movement’s position to resume its military campaign with U.S. and European support.

Moving Forward

Palestinians are presently trapped between two movements, Fatah and Hamas, that have neither provided meaningful support as they attempt to survive Israel’s genocidal campaign to eliminate them as a national and political entity, nor offered a credible vision for a future in whose realization they can participate.

Although both movements retain some degree of popular support, supplemented by general societal apathy, exhaustion, and a lack of alternatives, considerable resentment toward Fatah and Hamas nevertheless persists. For the time being, however, backlash is contained by their enduring capacities for repression.

In short, the Palestinian national movement in its present state is no longer viable. As the Palestinian people face the gravest threats to their existence, neither Fatah nor Hamas appears to have processed the consequences of their failings over the last several decades, or the past two years. Neither has demonstrated an ability, willingness, or even dedicated interest in advancing the necessary political transformations.

It is impossible to predict how the grief, anger, and frustration now brewing in Palestinian society, especially in the Gaza Strip, will eventually manifest. Ultimately, a new national movement may emerge, with leaders who can persuasively embody and advance their people’s rights and aspirations, unite them across geographies and politics, and honor the transformative traumas they continue to endure.

Uncertainty over the ultimate form notwithstanding, several possibilities are present. If the PLO is to be preserved, which would allow Palestinians to retain hard-won achievements and avoid starting over politically and institutionally—potentially setting them back years—a new representative leadership with a credible national program would have to be secured. For this to happen, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad would need to be recast and incorporated, and a strategic consensus among their constituent elements would need to be formulated.

Another possibility is that both Fatah and Hamas disintegrate and eventually fade from the scene, consumed by a combination of fossilized leadership, intensified rivalry, or internal strife. It would be difficult to envision the PLO’s survival should Fatah collapse before it is put right. It would be equally difficult to imagine that Hamas or Islamic Jihad can survive in their current form, given the disastrous outcome of the genocidal onslaught and the international consensus against their continued existence.

Just as the Nakba ended the national movement that held sway during the British Mandate, the dislocation produced by the Gaza genocide, in combination with intensely destabilizing Israeli policies in the West Bank, may result in a new vacuum. What would eventually replace, it is difficult to ascertain.

To add to the disarray, the state of Palestinian turmoil is coinciding with a period of striking regional and international transformation. The Middle East has been significantly impacted by the fallout of October 7, particularly as a result of unrestrained Israeli aggression across the region and shifting balances of power. In response, regional states may further look to constrain Palestinian activity to avoid the repercussions on their own soil. Meanwhile, the policies of Donald Trump—economic, political, and military—have been tremendously destabilizing to the prevailing international order and are testing its ability to survive and maintain relevance. In such a context, the Palestinians must maneuver through tumultuous political dynamics and shifting alignments as they recreate their polity from the ashes of genocide and political decay.

Conclusion

Palestinian society—today more vibrant and educated than in the 1940s and 1950s—is highly unlikely, whether inside Palestine or in exile, to surrender to political degradation and paralysis. The unprecedented global mobilization in support of Palestinian rights since 2023 is likely to encourage activists that there is fertile ground on which to act.

The required change is by no means imminent, and this is perhaps the most impactful consequence of the long process of political demise. Yet a Palestinian renaissance that addresses Palestinian needs is almost certain, given their innate strengths and enduring drive to achieve freedom.

Endnotes

¹ Ali Barada, “UN Special Rapporteur: Gaza Has Become ‘Unlivable,’” Asharq Al-Awsat, October 26, 2018, https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1438636/un-special-rapporteur-gaza-has-become-‘unliveable’.

² “Food Insecurity in Palestine – 2022,” Food Security Cluster, https://fscluster.org/sites/default/files/documents/food_insecurity_0.pdf.

³ Yara M. Asi, “We Are Doomed: Young People in Palestine Are Losing Hope”, The New Arab, November 21, 2022, https://www.newarab.com/opinion/we-are-doomed-young-people-palestine-are-losing-hope.

⁴ Ayman Abdul Majeed, Palestinian Youth: Identity, Participation and Space (American Friends Service Committee, Birzeit University, and the Center for Development Studies, 2020), 10. https://afsc.org/sites/default/files/documents/EN_Palestinian_Youth_Identity_Participation_and_Space_2020_E_version.pdf.

⁵ Patrick Kingsley and Iyad Abuheweila, “Gaza Protests Struggle to Gain Traction as Police Crack Down,” The New York Times, August 7, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/world/middleeast/gaza-strip-protests-hamas.html.

⁶ “Public Opinion Poll No. 88,” People’s Company for Polls and Survey Research, June 2023, https://pcpsr.org/en/node/944.

⁷ Sanaa Alsarghali, “The Dissolution of the Palestinian Legislative Council by the Palestinian Constitutional Court: A Missed Opportunity”, IACL-AIDC Blog, July 1, 2021, https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/menaregion/1-7-21the-dissolution-of-the-palestinian-legislative-council-c9bna.

⁸ “Nasser al-Qudwa Resigns from Fatah Central Committee,” Asharq Al-Awsat, May 7, 2018, https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1260586/nasser-al-qudwa-resigns-fatah-central-committee.

⁹ Dana Farraj, “Dismantling Abbas’s Rule over the Palestinian Judiciary,” Al-Shabaka, April 19, 2023, https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/dismantling-abbass-rule-over-the-palestinian-judiciary/.

¹⁰ Francesca Albanese, “Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Territories Occupied Since 1967,” United Nations, October 20, 2025, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/special-rapporteur-report-gaza-genocide-a-collective-crime-20oct25/.

¹¹ “EU Pushes Palestinian Authority Reform with Millions of Euros Donated at Forum,” The New Arab, November 20, 2025, https://www.newarab.com/news/eu-pushes-pa-reform-million-euro-donations-belgium-forum.

¹² Aseel Mafarjeh, “Financial Hardship Mounts for Families of Palestinian Prisoners and Martyrs as PA Slashes Support,” The New Arab, March 5, 2025, https://www.newarab.com/features/palestinian-authority-payment-cuts-leave-families-crisis.

¹³ “Press Statement Issued by Civil and Human Rights Organizations on the Decree-Law Regarding Local Elections,” AMAN, November 24, 2025, https://www.aman-palestine.org/en/activities/29498.html.

¹⁴ “US-Hamas direct talks: What’s happening and what comes next,” Al-Jazeera English, March 6, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/n ews/2025/3/6/us-hamas-direct-talks-whats-happening-and-what-comes-next.