October 7 Exposed the Depth of the Palestinian Leadership Crisis

The two years following October 7, 2023, have revealed to the Palestinian people the severity of a political crisis that had been mounting for years. Throughout this period, in which Palestinians have faced the most significant threat to their national existence since the 1948 Nakba, their institutional leadership has remained functionally absent, incapable of rising to the occasion by overcoming their fragmentation and charting a united strategy for confronting the immense challenges before them.

At its core, this leadership crisis reflects the steady erosion of the Palestinian political system’s institutional vitality and political dynamism over several decades, sapping its capacity to reproduce new leaders and strategies. The failure of its successive national projects—from total liberation of the homeland through armed struggle, to territorial compromise and state-building on the basis of a negotiated settlement—ultimately led to a contraction of political inclusiveness, as the prevailing leadership responded by hollowing out institutions and consolidating power, in alignment with external parties that prioritized neutralizing Palestinian resistance to Israel’s expanding territorial ambitions.

Consequently, Palestinians have been saddled with a weak yet highly repressive leadership, buoyed by external support, structurally wedded to a failed political program, unresponsive to its constituents, unchallenged by sclerotic and fragmented political factions, and unwilling to facilitate political renewal out of fear of losing its grip on power. This chapter examines the Palestinian’s crisis of leadership before and during this period.

BEFORE

Well before the events of October 7, 2023, that plunged Palestinian life into unprecedented turmoil, the Palestinian national movement was already suffering from a profound and protracted leadership crisis. Its principal representative institution, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), had long since fallen into abeyance. Although the origins of this process can be traced to at least Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the PLO’s subsequent defeat and the exile of its cadres, the assassination of key PLO leaders in exile, and the consequences of severe Israeli repression during the First Intifada, the focus of this paper is the transformation that occurred as a result of the Oslo peace process and state building project.

In pursuit of the PLO’s statehood objectives, the leadership gradually divested the national movement’s central organ of a meaningful decision-making role beyond reaffirming its commitment to the Oslo Accords and sustaining its principal creation: the Palestinian National Authority (PA).¹

However, the PA was never designed for national leadership. As a product of Oslo, the PA was established as a transitional entity limited to administering parts of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli oversight and external patronage, thus bound by narrow temporal, territorial, and jurisdictional restraints.² As such, the steady shift in power from the PLO to the PA throughout the Oslo era circumscribed Palestinian decision-making in several debilitating and disastrous ways.

The executive leadership—starting with Yasser Arafat and then Mahmoud Abbas—sought to helm both institutions, conflating the PLO and PA’s distinct mandates and obscuring their proper relational dynamics. Moreover, by resituating the PLO command within the occupied territories, Palestinian decision-making became acutely vulnerable to Israeli coercion and Western donor influence. The conflated roles of the leadership—simultaneously managing the responsibilities of governance and the imperatives of national liberation—blurred the distinction between bureaucratic administration and revolutionary struggle. It subordinated the liberation project (the PLO’s mandate) to the managerial constraints of semi-autonomous rule (the PA’s mandate), while allowing donor states to condition PA financing in ways often deferential to Israeli interests.³

This was not merely a political miscalculation, but a structural re-engineering of Palestinian politics. Oslo transformed the national movement into a complicit governance apparatus whose institutional survival depended not on advancing liberation but on maintaining order under occupation. Leadership failure, in this sense, was inherent: the product of a political framework designed to foreclose independent decision-making.

This structural and geographic reordering also severed the link between decision-makers under occupation and Palestinian communities in exile—refugees and diaspora groups that once formed the backbone of the national movement—including leaders who had objected to Oslo and stayed outside the occupied territories.

The emergence of Hamas in the late 1980s, which operated outside PLO-PA structures, further challenged the authority of these institutions and their political program throughout the 1990s and 2000s. As the Oslo process itself collapsed, so too did the PA’s legitimacy, deepening the leadership crisis. Hamas’ decision to contest the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections—winning a majority of seats—triggered a violent power struggle with the Abbas presidency and the Fatah movement, culminating in the 2007 political and geographic split between Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Fatah-led PA in the West Bank.⁴

This division proved politically catastrophic, not least for the foundation of Palestinian leadership itself. As Abbas hollowed out and consolidated control over what remained of the institutions under his purview, fledgling democratic processes gave way to naked authoritarianism, further undermining his legitimacy as the leader of the national movement.⁵ “Transformational leadership,” in the sense theorized by James MacGregor Burns and Bernard Bass—driven by inspiring personalities and a collective mission—devolved into a system of personal rule sustained by patronage and repression.⁶

Within Fatah itself, Abbas’ centralized and exclusionary leadership style marginalized and alienated many established figures, among them younger leaders such as Marwan Barghouti, Mohammad Dahlan, and Jabril Rajoub, who in the early 2000s sought a greater role in decision-making and were rebuffed. This led to the splintering and factionalization of Fatah, as reflected in the proliferation of competing Fatah-affiliated lists before both the 2006 and aborted 2021 parliamentary elections.⁷

Meanwhile, Palestinian society has been deliberately demobilized.⁸ Activists and critics, especially youth, have faced harassment, co-optation, and surveillance from both the Israeli and the PA’s security apparatus. The PA security forces—trained, funded, and politically shielded by external actors—became the enforcer of this order. Security coordination with Israel was not merely a policy choice but the principal mechanism through which the Oslo system sustained itself—criminalizing resistance, suppressing dissent, and converting the leadership’s dependency into a permanent feature of Palestinian political life.

The abandonment of elections has extinguished any meaningful avenues for political contestation or the emergence of new leadership. The monopolization of authority by Abbas and his inner circle has sapped Palestinian politics of its dynamism, while reducing political debate to the question of succession rather than renewal.

Hamas, though outside the PLO, has fared better institutionally. Its internal bureaucracy and capacity for regeneration have allowed its leadership structure to withstand years of assassination, imprisonment, and forced exile. However, while the movement did not suffer from the sclerotic decline of Fatah, the crippling blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza, and Hamas’ inability to deliver liberation, relief, or effective administration—alongside its own repressive activities—made it deeply unpopular among the population it governed.

Operating in conditions of siege, isolation, and exclusion from national decision-making structures, Hamas was left without either the legitimacy of electoral renewal or the constraints of a collective leadership framework. Its capacity to act unilaterally—most consequentially in its decision to launch the Al-Aqsa Flood operation—was thus not an aberration but a systemic outcome of a fragmented and leaderless national movement.

Beyond these formal political structures lies an energetic Palestinian diaspora. Activists, civil society organizations, and transnational networks remain deeply engaged in the national struggle. However, they are excluded from the machinery of institutional politics and are unable to coordinate their efforts into a unified strategy. Rights-based initiatives such as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement exemplify this energy but also the limitation of advocacy divorced from a recognized political agent with a coherent political program.

Lacking recognized authority, fiscal resources, or coercive leverage, diaspora initiatives—however morally or discursively compelling—remain structurally incapable of substituting for institutional leadership. In fact, their efforts are often neutralized by the internationally recognized Palestinian leadership itself, whose dependence on external political, financial, and security constraints leads it to obstruct or dilute initiatives that fall outside its narrow governing mandate.

By the eve of October 7, Palestinians lacked a unified, representative leadership. Fragmented geographically and politically, the remnants of the national movement operated in silos—each pursuing divergent, often conflicting, agendas. The outcome was a severely debilitated national movement, totally unprepared for the fallout of Hamas’ unilateral decision to launch an unprecedented military operation against Israel.

AFTER

October 7 and Its Aftermath

While Palestinian factions have historically acted independently of each other in ways that shaped the wider movement—such as the PFLP’s plane hijackings in the 1970s that led to the Black September war with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Syrian-backed “War of the Camps” in Lebanon in the 1980s after the PLO’s expulsion, or Fateh’s secret negotiations with Israel that led to the Oslo Accords—few such decisions have had repercussions as far-reaching as Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel.

Over the ensuing two years, Palestinians endured the most devastating attack on their collective existence since the 1948 Nakba. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza was genocidal in scope and intent. At least 70,000 Palestinians—predominantly women and children—were killed, and experts estimate that direct and indirect deaths from starvation, disease, and lack of medical care could push the toll into the hundreds of thousands.⁹ More than two million people were displaced, with famine widespread as Israel deliberately blocked food, water, and medicine.¹⁰ Gaza’s urban landscape was obliterated, its infrastructure reduced to rubble, and its cultural heritage erased. In short, the territory was deliberately rendered uninhabitable.

In the West Bank, violence and repression escalated to their highest levels in decades. Settler attacks, military raids, and mass arrests intensified, while land expropriation reached levels unseen since Oslo’s signing in 1993. Dozens of communities were forcibly displaced. In northern cities such as Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarem, the Israeli military sought to crush armed resistance through collective punishment and economic strangulation, instilling a pervasive atmosphere of fear and paralysis.¹¹

Leadership Vacuum and Political Absence

Throughout this catastrophe, the Palestinian leadership was conspicuously absent. The Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s highest representative body, did not convene once. Abbas, both PLO chairman and PA president, was largely absent from public view, appearing sporadically at international fora such as the UN General Assembly and the Arab League without mounting any serious diplomatic campaign to protect his people, much less a visit to Gaza.

This paralysis reflects not only the personal inertia of a man in his late 80s, but decades of institutional decay. The PA and PLO have become passive recipients of externally driven agendas rather than initiators of political vision. In this sense, the Palestinian leadership crisis is not simply one of absence but of foreclosure: even where legal recognition and diplomatic access exist, the lack of an authoritative, unified political agent renders these tools inert. International law and solidarity require activation. Without a legitimate leadership capable of leveraging them, legal victories accumulate, and popular support surges and ebbs, without political effect.

The PA’s sole relevance during the genocide appeared to come from the Arab states’ need for a nominal Palestinian interlocutor to secure a pathway out of their potential post-war involvement in Gaza. In other words, to avoid ensnarement in a permanent security and governance role—especially with Israel obstructing a broader political resolution of the conflict—they needed to secure a Palestinian entity to whom they could eventually hand over responsibility.

The “State of Palestine” remains a recognized address in international diplomacy, yet it speaks with no clear political authority or unity of purpose—given its lack of sovereignty, the murkiness of institutional overlap, and the leadership’s lack of popular legitimacy.

Hamas, for its part, has been severely debilitated by Israel’s military response to October 7 and by the deepening of its diplomatic isolation after the attack. Hamas’ leadership in Gaza has been decimated, while its exiled political bureau has been targeted for assassination across the Middle East, and was otherwise preoccupied with ceasefire negotiations and damage control in the two years after its October 7 operation.

Long ostracized by Western governments and many Arab states, Hamas lacked the diplomatic reach to influence the postwar order. Where Hamas had a seat at the table, it was forced to negotiate under extreme duress, often receiving ultimatums in which the broader civilian population bore the consequences of Hamas’ potential rejection. Coupled with the growing irrelevance of the PLO-PA leadership, this left Palestinians without a say in the international deliberations shaping their future.

The political marginalization of Palestinian leadership was epitomized in the drafting and signing of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” in October 2025. Not only was Hamas not part of the negotiations that formulated the plan—except to agree to the release of Israeli hostages and discuss the terms of its own dissolution—but Abbas was initially denied an invitation to attend the signing ceremony in Egypt before being relegated to an observer role.¹²

Although the PA is mentioned in the Trump Peace Plan of 2025—likely as a result of Arab insistence—its future involvement in the governance of Gaza is conditional on a reform program under Israeli oversight. In the meantime, general Palestinian involvement is reduced to an implementation committee approved and instructed by an international board led by Donald Trump.

A Leaderless Nation

The consequences of this vacuum have been disastrous. Palestinians have no unified voice to articulate their cause internationally. This not only leaves them vulnerable to external agendas but also prevents them from fully exploiting the opportunities that have emerged amid the devastation.

Global solidarity, legal clarity, and moral outrage—however unprecedented—cannot substitute for institutional power and effective leadership. Israel has exploited Palestinian political fragmentation to absorb international pressure at limited cost, confident that no unified leadership exists capable of translating condemnation into consequence.

Attempts to repair the Palestinians’ fragmented polity or restore legitimate representation in a revived PLO have also failed. In 2024, 14 Palestinian factions met in Moscow and Beijing to discuss establishing a national unity government and reforming the PLO. Behind the scenes, however, Abbas reportedly dismissed the Beijing Accord and implementation stalled—repeating the outcome of 17 years of unsuccessful reconciliation attempts.¹³

Diaspora initiatives to revive the PLO have similarly struggled to gain traction, in no small part due to Abbas’s obstruction. A notable example is the National Conference for Palestine held in Doha in February 2025, which attracted hundreds of attendees, including numerous prominent personalities. As momentum picked up for the initiative, Abbas denounced it as a foreign plot, and the PA obstructed dozens of participants from leaving the West Bank to attend.¹⁴ Other grassroots initiatives have fragmented over whether to reform existing structures or build new ones, and no alternative leadership has yet emerged.

In the meantime, Abbas has continued to position his right-hand man, Hussein al-Sheikh, as his designated successor, despite enjoying virtually no popular support.¹⁵ Al-Sheikh, who long held the role of liaison between the PA and the Israeli military occupation authorities, has been described by Israeli security officials as their “man in Ramallah,” which has further undermined his credibility in Palestinian eyes.¹⁶ In January 2022, however, Abbas had al-Sheikh placed on the PLO’s Executive Committee and then promoted him to its Secretary-General in May of that year.¹⁷ In April 2025, Abbas created two new positions—vice president of the State of Palestine and vice chairman of the PLO’s Executive Committee—and appointed al-Sheikh to both.¹⁸ In October 2025, Abbas issued a decree designating al-Sheikh as acting president of the PA should he die or become incapacitated for up to 90 days until elections are held, a move with no legal basis according to the Palestinian Basic Law.¹⁹

The closest thing to a consensus figure, Marwan Barghouti, remains in Israeli prison, although renewed pressure for his release emerged in the wake of the October 2025 ceasefire and Hamas’ attempt to free him through a hostage exchange.²⁰

Short of that, the obstruction of democratic processes for renewing legitimate Palestinian representation is a recipe for civil conflict. Yet even if that is somehow avoided through a power-sharing agreement, the popular will of Palestinians would continue to be ignored.

Going Forward

The absence of effective leadership is no longer merely a political deficiency but a national emergency. Without a unified and legitimate representative body, Palestinians cannot confront the existential threats they face or capitalize on diplomatic openings that have arisen from Israel’s growing global isolation.

Palestinians now find themselves in a condition reminiscent of the post-1948 period—leaderless, dispossessed, and fragmented. Yet unlike in the past, they now possess significant assets that can be leveraged. Palestinian identity and nationalism are stronger than ever, and global solidarity for the Palestinian cause has reached unprecedented levels—including in the United States and Western Europe. As of October 2025, 157 states recognize the State of Palestine.²¹

Recent rulings by the International Court of Justice and United Nations agencies have established the illegality of Israel’s occupation and apartheid, and the likelihood that it has violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.²² Israeli leaders are fugitives of the International Criminal Court. In other words, Israeli criminality is firmly established by leading international institutions and provides a strong basis for pursuing accountability.

Yet on the ground, Israel continues to wield overwhelming coercive power—not only through military occupation, but through sway over the Palestinian economy and political elite. The current leadership, bound by privilege and dependency, lacks the will to challenge this structure.

For the Palestinian national movement to recover, it must prioritize the reconstitution of legitimate and independent leadership. This entails two essential tasks: First, establishing institutions that reflect the full geographic and political diversity of the Palestinian people—across historic Palestine, refugee camps, and the global diaspora; and second, restoring independent decision-making as free as possible from the coercion of occupation and external tutelage, even if that means relocating top decision-makers outside the occupied territories.

The current moment presents both peril and possibility. Palestinians face unprecedented destruction and dispossession, yet they also command historic levels of international sympathy and legal recognition. To translate that moral and diplomatic capital into political progress, they must rebuild a collective leadership capable of uniting the struggle for rights, governance, and liberation. Without it, the Palestinian national movement will remain rudderless—adrift between catastrophe and opportunity, unable to chart a course toward genuine self-determination.

Endnotes

¹ Rashid Khalidi, “The Crisis of the Palestinian Political System,” Politique étrangère, Autumn Issue (3), 2009, 651-662. https://doi.org/10.3917/pe.093.0651.

² “Explainer: The Palestinian Authority,” Institute for Middle East Understanding, July 2, 2021, https://imeu.org/resources/palestine-101/explainer-the-palestinian-authority/153; Omar Rahman, From confusion to clarity: Three pillars for revitalizing the Palestinian national movement, (Doha: Qatar, Brookings Doha Center, December 12, 2019), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/from-confusion-to-clarity/.

³ Ayat Hamdan, Foreign Aid and the Molding of the Palestinian Space, (Ramallah, Palestine: Bisan Center for Research and Development, October 2011), https://www.campusincamps.ps/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Forgin-Aid-final-with-cover.pdf.

⁴ Bruce Riedel, Battle for Gaza: Hamas Jumped, Provoked and Pushed, Op-Ed. (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, August 16, 2007), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/battle-for-gaza-hamas-jumped-provoked-and-pushed/.

⁵ Tareq Baconi, “Leadership Without a Vision for Liberation,” Al-Shabaka, Roundtable – The Legacy of Mahmoud Abbas, January 9, 2023, https://al-shabaka.org/roundtables/the-legacy-of-mahmoud-abbas/.

⁶ Roger J. Givens, “Transformational Leadership: The Impact on Organizational and Personal Outcomes,” Emerging Leadership Journeys 1, no. 1 (2008), https://www.regent.edu/journal/emerging-leadership-journeys/transformational-leadership-the-impact-on-organizational-and-personal-outcomes/.

⁷ Robert Booth and Conal Urguhart, “Election revolt against Fatah’s ‘old guard’ splits party in two,” The Guardian, December 14, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/15/israel2; Omar Rahman, How the Cancelation of Elections Leaves Palestinians with Nowhere to Turn, (Washington, DC, New Lines Institute, May 28, 2021), https://newlinesinstitute.org/middle-east-center/how-the-cancelation-of-elections-leaves-palestinians-with-nowhere-to-turn/.

⁸ Dana El Kurd, “The Effect of the Palestinian Authority on Political Engagement,” Siyasat Arabiya, Issue 35, Article 4, (November 2018), https://siyasatarabiya.dohainstitute.org/en/issue035/Pages/art04.aspx.

⁹ “Israel-Gaza war death toll: Live Tracker,” Al Jazeera, December 12, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/18/gaza-tracker.

¹⁰ “Nowhere safe in Gaza,” Al Jazeera, accessed April 13, 2026, https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2024/displacement-israel-war-on-gaza-no-safe-place/.

¹¹ Luc Bronner, “Israel’s reign of terror over the West Bank,” Le Monde, December 10, 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/12/10/israel-imposes-reign-of-terror-on-the-west-bank_6748359_4.html.

¹² “Exclusive: Sharm el-Sheikh summit on Gaza to convene without Palestinian Authority participation,” The New Arab, October 12, 2025, https://www.newarab.com/news/exclusive-sharm-el-sheikh-summit-gaza-convene-without-pa; Nurit Yohanan, “Report: After initially being refused, Palestinian Authority leader to attend Egypt summit tomorrow,” The Times of Israel, October 12, 2025, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/report-after-initially-being-refused-palestinian-authority-leader-to-attend-egypt-summit-tomorrow/.

¹³ Khaled Elgindy, “The Fall and Fall of Mahmoud Abbas,” Foreign Affairs, August 30, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/palestinian-territories/fall-and-fall-mahmoud-abbas; Tamer Qarmout, “Predictable in Their Failure: An Analysis of Mediation Efforts to End the Palestinian Split,” International Peacekeeping 31, no. 3 (April 2024): 283–308, https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2024.2338410.

¹⁴ “Palestinian national conference calls for rebuilding the PLO,” The New Arab, February 19, 2025, https://www.newarab.com/news/palestinian-national-conference-calls-rebuilding-plo.

¹⁵ Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, “Press Release: Palestinian Public Opinion Poll (92),” press release, June 12, 2024, https://pcpsr.org/en/node/980; Jack Khoury, “Can Abbas’ Chosen Heir Lead the Palestinian Authority Without Any Public Support?” Haaretz, November 13, 2025, https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/2025-11-13/ty-article-magazine/.premium/can-abbass-designated-heir-lead-the-palestinian-authority-without-any-public-support/0000019a-7c8b-d326-a3ff-fc9b4c980000. In this article, Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki says that al-Sheikh no longer receives even 2% of public support and his name “doesn’t exist in the public consciousness” as a viable leader.

¹⁶ Adam Ragson and Aaron Boxerman, “The Palestinian Leader Who Survived the Death of Palestine,” Foreign Policy Magazine, July 31, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/31/palestine-hussein-al-sheikh-nationalism-fatah-west-bank-palestinian-authority-israel/.

¹⁷ Kifah Zboun, “Al Sheikh’s Appointment as PLO Secretary-General Brings Him Closer to Succeeding Abbas,” Al Sharq Al-Awsat, May 27, 2022, https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3668891/al-sheikh’s-appointment-plo-secretary-general-brings-him-closer-succeeding.

¹⁸ Nurit Yohanan, “Top Abbas aide Hussein al-Sheikh tapped as first ever PLO vice president,” The Times of Israel, April 29, 2025, https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-abbas-aide-hussein-al-sheikh-tapped-as-first-ever-plo-vice-president/.

¹⁹ Nathan J. Brown, “Abbas Names a Successor (Again),” Diwan, October 30, 2025, https://carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/diwan/2025/10/abbas-names-a-successor-again.

²⁰ Rushdi Abualouf, “Hamas presses Israel to release prominent prisoners as part of Gaza deal,” BBC, October 11, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd727d2ne42o.

²¹ Marium Ali, “Which are the 150+ countries that have recognized Palestine as of 2025?” Al Jazeera, September 23, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/23/which-are-the-150-countries-that-have-recognised-palestine-as-of-2025.

²² “ICJ says Israel’s presence in Palestinian territory is unlawful,” Al Jazeera English, July 19, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/19/world-court-says-israels-settlement-policies-breach-international-law; “Gaza: World Court Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide,” Human Rights Watch, January 26, 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/26/gaza-world-court-orders-israel-prevent-genocide; David Gritten and Imogen Foulkes, “Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, UN commission of inquiry says,” BBC, September 16, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8641wv0n4go.