Two Governments, One Cause: The Palestinian Split Explained
By The Israel Desk NewsroomPublished:
News reports say "the Palestinians" accepted, rejected or demanded something, as if a single address answers the phone. There is no such address. Since 2007 there have been two rival Palestinian governments, run by movements that jail each other's activists, and almost every story in this section rests on that split. Here is the map.
Four names, four things
The PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, is the umbrella founded in 1964 that the world recognizes as the Palestinians' representative; it signed the Oslo Accords with Israel. Fatah is the largest faction inside the PLO, the party of Yasser Arafat and, since his death, of Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian Authority is the self-government body that Oslo created in 1994 to administer Palestinian population centers. Hamas, founded in 1987 as the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian branch, is an Islamist movement that rejects Oslo, sits outside the PLO, and is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, the European Union and others.
How the split happened
Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election of January 2006, beating Fatah. A year of failed power-sharing collapsed in June 2007, when Hamas seized Gaza by force, throwing Fatah men from rooftops and taking the security compounds in days. Since then Gaza has been run by Hamas, while the Fatah-dominated PA governs the Palestinian cities of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. Each side calls the other illegitimate. Repeated reconciliation agreements, signed in Cairo, Doha, Mecca and Moscow, have failed to reunite them.
What each one is
The PA in Ramallah holds limited civil and security powers under the Oslo framework, coordinates on security with Israel against Hamas cells, pays salaries across the territories, and has not held a presidential election since 2005. Abbas, elected that year for four years, remains in office two decades later. Hamas in Gaza built an armed statelet: a tax system at the crossings, an interior ministry, and above all a military wing whose tunnels, rockets and October 7, 2023 assault on Israel defined the current era.
The smaller players
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, smaller than Hamas and closer to Iran, fights alongside it from Gaza without governing anything. The Popular Front and other PLO factions retain names and flags with modest followings. In the West Bank's northern cities, armed networks only loosely controlled by anyone emerged as a force of their own in recent years.
Why the split drives the story
Every diplomatic question runs into the same wall: an agreement with Ramallah does not bind Gaza, and no Palestinian leader today can credibly sign for both. When you read that "the Palestinians" did anything, the first question is always which ones. This section exists to keep asking it.
