Palestine
Izz ad-Din al-Qassam
Syrian-born cleric who organised the first armed Palestinian peasant cells against British rule and Zionist land purchase in the early 1930s, was killed in a British ambush in November 1935 — his death triggering the Arab Revolt of 1936. Hamas's military wing is named the Qassam Brigades in his honour.
1882–1935
Palestine
Fawzi al-Qawuqji
Pan-Arab military commander who led volunteer forces in the 1936–39 Arab Revolt and commanded the Arab Liberation Army during the 1948 war — a professional soldier who fought across four decades of Arab anti-colonial resistance.
1890–1977
Palestine
Hassan Salameh
Palestinian military commander who led operations in the Jerusalem and Jaffa districts during the 1936–39 Revolt and commanded forces in the 1948 war in the coastal plain — killed in battle at Ras al-Ein in May 1948.
1913–1948
Palestine
Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni
Commander of the Holy Jihad Army in the Jerusalem district during the 1948 war, who organised the defence of the Jerusalem corridor against Jewish forces and was killed at the Battle of al-Qastal on 8 April 1948 — the day before the Deir Yassin massacre. The most celebrated Palestinian military figure of 1948.
1907–1948
Palestine
Yasser Arafat
Chairman of the PLO for nearly four decades, co-founder of Fatah, the face of Palestinian national identity on the world stage — who addressed the UN General Assembly with a gun and an olive branch in 1974, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, and died in disputed circumstances in 2004.
1929–2004
Palestine
Abu Jihad
Khalil al-Wazir — co-founder of Fatah, the PLO's military commander, and the organiser of the Palestinian armed struggle from 1965 until his assassination by Israeli special forces in his Tunis home in April 1988.
1935–1988
Palestine
Abu Iyad
Salah Khalaf — co-founder of Fatah, head of Fatah's intelligence and security apparatus, and one of the PLO's most powerful internal figures — assassinated in Tunis in January 1991 by a Palestinian collaborator acting for Abu Nidal.
1933–1991
Palestine
George Habash
"Al-Hakim" — the Doctor — founder and Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Marxist-Leninist theorist of Palestinian resistance, and the principal architect of the aircraft hijacking campaigns of the late 1960s.
1926–2008
Palestine
Wadi Haddad
Co-founder of the PFLP and its operational commander — the planner of the 1968 El Al hijacking to Algeria, the 1970 Dawson's Field multiple hijacking, and the 1976 Entebbe hijacking. Died of cancer (or possibly Israeli assassination by poisoned toothbrush) in 1978.
1927–1978
Palestine
Nayef Hawatmeh
Jordanian-Palestinian Marxist who split from the PFLP to found the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) — the organisation whose 1974 Maalot massacre contributed to its own political isolation, and which Hawatmeh subsequently led toward support for a two-state solution.
1938–
Palestine
Leila Khaled
PFLP guerrilla who hijacked TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and participated in the attempted hijacking of El Al Flight 219 in 1970 — her photograph, keffiyeh-wrapped and rifle in hand, became one of the defining images of the Palestinian resistance and of women in armed struggle worldwide.
1944–
Palestine
Ghassan Kanafani
Novelist, short-story writer, and PFLP spokesman whose fiction — Men in the Sun, Return to Haifa, All That's Left to You — made Palestinian refugee experience into world literature. Assassinated by a Mossad car bomb in Beirut on 8 July 1972, aged thirty-six.
1936–1972
Palestine
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod
Palestinian-American academic, political scientist, and intellectual who translated the Palestinian cause into the language of international human rights and decolonisation theory — shaping how Palestinian claims were understood in Western universities and policy circles.
1929–2001