ABSTRACT
Hamas 1 is considered to be the second biggest Palestinian organisation after the Fatah. It was established in late 1987 with the outbreak of the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising, as a religious alternative to Fatah, and hence it represented a dramatic challenge to Fatah hegemony within the Palestinian arena. Unlike Fatah, which was initiated by and operated for many years within the Palestinian diaspora, Hamas emerged within the Palestinian Territories. Further, it was deeply involved socially with Palestinian society from 1945, long before Hamas’s formal creation as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, a very dominant Islamic movement that later spread to other Arab countries and Palestine, and was involved mainly in social and cultural activities within civil society (Abu Amr, 1994; Zahid, 2012).
