1948 to 1956 Palestinian immigration into Israel first emerged among the
Palestinian refugees of the
1948 Arab–Israeli War, living in
camps in Jordan (including the
Jordanian-occupied West Bank), Lebanon, Egypt (including the Egyptian
All-Palestine Protectorate in Gaza), and Syria. Initially, most infiltrations were economic in nature, with Palestinians crossing the border seeking food or the recovery of property lost in the 1948 war. with the goal being the prevention of escalation into another war. The problem of establishing and guarding the demarcation line separating the All-Palestine Protectorate in Gaza from the Israeli-held
Negev area proved vexing, largely due to the presence of over 200,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in the Gaza area. The terms of the armistice agreement restricted Egypt's use and deployment of regular armed forces in the Gaza Strip. In keeping with this restriction, the Egyptian government's solution was to form a Palestinian paramilitary police force. The Palestinian border police was created in December 1952. The border police were placed under the command of
'Abd-al-Man'imi 'Abd-al-Ra'uf, a former Egyptian air brigade commander,
Muslim Brotherhood member, and Revolutionary Council member. The training of 250 Palestinian volunteers started in March 1953, with further volunteers coming forward for training in May and December. Some border police personnel were attached to the military governor's office under 'Abd-al-'Azim al-Saharti to guard public installations in the Gaza Strip. After an Israeli raid on an
Egyptian military outpost in Gaza in February 1955, during which 37 Egyptian soldiers were killed, the Egyptian government began to actively sponsor fedayeen raids into Israel. The first insurrection by Palestinian fedayeen may have been launched from Syrian territory in 1951, though most attacks between 1951 and 1953 were launched from Jordanian territory. According to
Yehoshafat Harkabi, former head of
Israeli military intelligence, these early infiltrations were limited "incursions", initially motivated by economic reasons, including the crossing of Palestinians into Israel to harvest crops in their former villages. In its five-month existence, Unit 101 was also responsible for carrying out the
Qibya massacre on the night of 14–15 October 1953 in the Jordanian village of the same name. Morris explains that Gilbert's fatality figures are "3-5 times higher than the figures given in contemporary Israeli reports" and that they seem to be based on a 1956 speech by David Ben-Gurion in which he uses the word ''nifga'im'' () to refer to "casualties" in the broad sense of the term (i.e., both the dead and the wounded). Dozens of these attacks are today cited by the Israeli government as major Arab terrorist attacks against Israelis prior to the 1967
Six-Day War. United Nations reports indicate that between 1949 and 1956, Israel launched more than seventeen raids on Egyptian territory and 31 attacks on Arab towns or military forces. From late 1954 onwards, larger-scale fedayeen operations were mounted from Egyptian territory. General
Mustafa Hafez, commander of
Egyptian army intelligence in the mid-1950s, is said to have founded Palestinian fedayeen units "to launch terrorist raids across Israel's southern border," nearly always against civilians. In a speech on 31 August 1955, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein said: In 1955, it is reported that 260 Israeli citizens were killed or wounded in fedayeen terrorist attacks. Some believe fedayeen attacks contributed to the outbreak of the
Suez Crisis, and the attacks were cited by Israeli government officials as the reason for undertaking the
1956 Sinai campaign. Others argue that Israel "engineered eve-of-war lies and deceptions.... to give Israel the excuse needed to launch its strike", such as presenting a group of "captured fedayeen" to journalists who were in fact Israeli soldiers. In 1956,
Israeli troops entered
Khan Yunis in the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, conducting house-to-house searches for Palestinian fedayeen and weaponry. During the operation, 275 Palestinians were killed, with an additional 111 killed in Israeli raids on the
Rafah refugee camp. Israeli officials contended the killings resulted from refugee resistance, which Chomsky claims was denied by the refugees themselves. During the invasion of the Sinai, Israeli forces killed fifty fedayeen on a lorry in
Ras Sedr. After Israel took control of the
Gaza Strip, dozens of fedayeen were killed: Sixty-six were killed in screening operations in the area, and a US diplomat estimated that of the 500 fedayeen captured by the Israel Defense Forces, about 30 were killed. During the mid- and late 1960s, there emerged a number of independent Palestinian fedayeen groups who sought "the liberation of all
Palestine through a Palestinian armed struggle." The first incursion by these fedayeen may have been the 1 January 1965 commando infiltration into Israel to plant explosives, which destroyed a section of pipeline designed to divert water from the
Jordan River into Israel. In 1966, the Israeli military
attacked the Jordanian-controlled West Bank village of
as-Samu in response to
Fatah raids against Israel's eastern border, increasing tensions preceding the
Six-Day War.
1967 to 1987 patrol unit in
Jordan, 1969 Fedayeen groups began joining the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968. While the PLO was the "unifying framework" under which these groups operated, each fedayeen organization had its own leader and armed forces and retained autonomy in operations.
West Bank In the late 1960s, attempts were made to organize fedayeen resistance cells among the refugee population in the West Bank. The stony and empty terrain of the West Bank mountains made the fedayeen easy to spot, and Israeli forces' collective punishment against the families of fighters resulted in the fedayeen being pushed out of the West Bank altogether within a few months. The increasing ferocity of those Israeli reprisals directed at Jordanians for fedayeen raids into Israel became a growing cause of concern for the Jordanian authorities. stating, "We want to convince the world that there are those in the Arab world who will not withdraw or flee." Fatah remained, and the
Jordanian Army agreed to back them if heavy fighting ensued. By the battle's end, 100 Fatah militants had been killed, 100 wounded, and 120–150 captured; Jordanian fatalities were 61 soldiers and civilians and 108 wounded; and Israeli casualties were 28 soldiers killed and 69 wounded. Thirteen Jordanian tanks were destroyed in the battle, while the Israelis lost four tanks, three half-tracks, two
armoured cars, and Jordanian forces shot down an airplane. The Battle of Karameh raised the profile of the fedayeen. Despite the higher Arab death toll, Fatah considered the battle a victory because of the Israeli army's rapid withdrawal. The ruling
Hashemite authorities in Jordan grew increasingly alarmed by the PLO's activities as the latter established a "state within a state", providing
military education and training and social welfare services to the Palestinian population, bypassing the Jordanian authorities. Palestinian criticism of the poor performance of the
Arab Legion, the Jordanian king's army, was an insult to both the king and the regime. Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon and its shelling of the capital
Beirut in the
1982 Lebanon War eventually forced the Palestinian fedayeen to accept an internationally brokered agreement that moved them out of Lebanon to different places in the Arab world.
First Intifada On 25 November 1987, PFLP-GC launched an
attack, in which two fedayeen infiltrated northern Israel from an undisclosed Syrian-controlled area in southern Lebanon with hang gliders. One of them was killed at the border, while the other proceeded to land at an army camp, initially killing a soldier in a passing vehicle, then five more in the camp, before being shot dead.
Thomas Friedman wrote that judging by commentary in the Arab world, the raid was seen as a boost to the Palestinian national movement, just as it had seemed to be almost totally eclipsed by the
Iran–Iraq War. Palestinians in Gaza began taunting Israeli soldiers, chanting "six to one"; the raid has been noted as a catalyst to the
First Intifada. During the First Intifada,
Palestinian armed violence was intended to be minimized in favor of mass demonstrations and acts of
civil disobedience, according to Jamal Raji Nassar.
Second Intifada and current situation After being dormant for many years, Palestinian fedayeen reactivated their operations during the
Second Intifada. In August 2001, ten Palestinian commandos from the DFLP penetrated the electric fences of the fortified army base of
Bedolah, killing an Israeli major and two soldiers and wounding seven others. One of the commandos was killed in the firefight. Another was tracked for hours and later shot in the head, while the rest escaped. In Gaza, the attack produced "a sense of euphoria—and nostalgia for the Palestinian fedayeen raids in the early days of the
Jewish state". Israel responded by launching airstrikes at the police headquarters in Gaza City, an intelligence building in the central Gaza town of
Deir al-Balah, and a police building in the West Bank town of
Salfit. Salah Zeidan, head of the DFLP in Gaza, stated of the operation that "It's a classic model—soldier to soldier, gun to gun, face to face [...] Our technical expertise has increased in recent days. So has our courage, and people are going to see that this is a better way to resist the occupation than suicide bombs inside the Jewish state." The fedayeen have been eclipsed politically by the
Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which consists of the major factions of the PLO and
Islamist groups, particularly
Hamas. Already-strained relations between Hamas and the PNA collapsed entirely when the former
took over the Gaza Strip in 2007. Although the fedayeen are leftist and secular, during the
2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, fedayeen groups fought alongside and in coordination with Hamas, even though a number of the factions were previously sworn enemies of them. The
al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed faction loyal to the Fatah-controlled PNA, undermined Palestinian president
Mahmoud Abbas by lobbing rockets into southern Israel in concert with rivals Hamas and the
Islamic Jihad. According to researcher Maha Azzam, this symbolized the disintegration of Fatah and the division between the grassroots organization and the current leadership. The PFLP and the
Popular Resistance Committees also joined the fighting. ==Philosophical grounding and objectives==