During the 1950s, the expulsions and massacres continued: as examples, there was the expulsion of the people of 13 small villages in Wadi ‘Ara (to the south of the Galilee) in February 1951, and the people of al-Majdal town (Ashkelon has been constructed on its site) in April 1951. In October 1953, 53 Palestinians were killed when houses in the village of Qibya (in the district of Qalqilya) were bombarded. In 1956, Palestinians enthusiastically supported Egyptian president Jamal Abdul Nasser and the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The tripartite (Anglo-Franco-Israeli) aggression against Egypt permitted the state of Israel to occupy the Gaza Strip and part of Sinai for several months.

On November 3, 1956, Israeli forces massacred more than 273 Palestinian civilians in the refugee camp of Khan Younis and on November 12, 1956 over 100 Palestinian civilians were massacred in the Rafah refugee camp. At this time, there was a bloody repression carried out against Palestinians of 48 (the massacre of 49 Palestinians in the village of Kufr Qassem, near Tel Aviv, in October 1956), who had rallied to the cause of Arab nationalism. [see Kufr Qassem, p. 358].

From 1949 onwards, small groups of resistance fighters carried out military operations against the State of Israel, whose soldiers increased their attacks on border villages and Gaza. In 1959, a group of fighters formed a project to unite militants in different places into one organization which would take up the fight for freedom. They hoped to push the Arab states into action on their behalf and to stimulate an armed struggle on the model of the Algerian and Vietnamese liberation struggles. These men, who bore the names Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar), Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and Yusef en- Najjar founded the underground Fatah movement. Its military branch, al-Assifa (the Storm), carried out its first operation on January 1, 1965. In the same years, the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) also embarked on the path of armed struggle. These military organizations had such names as “The Heroes of Return,” or “Youth Organisation for Vengeance.” Key figures in the Palestinian section of the ANM, among them Dr. George Habash (al-Hakim), Dr. Wadi' Haddad, Mustapha Ali Zabri (Abu Ali Mustapha) and Ghassan Kanafani, inaugurated the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) after the Arab defeat of 1967 fell on Gaza and on the West Bank.

In response to this new occupation, the UN passed Resolution 242 on 29 November, 1967 (20 years after the Partition Plan!), a vague document which neither stated which territories Israel should withdraw from nor gave a time frame for a withdrawal, and which implicitly accepted as borders the armistice lines of the 1948 war (in total contradiction to Resolution 181). The defeat of the Arab armies led to an unprecedented development: Palestinian resistance groups started to take up the war of liberation. They rejected en masse Resolution 242 which “ignores the national rights of the Palestinian people. It does not mention the existence of these people” (Fatah Central Committee).

On March 21, 1968, the Palestinian resistance movement, at the cost of heavy losses, repulsed an Israeli attack on the Karameh refugee camp (on the eastern bank of the Jordan Valley, north of Shuneh). This Palestinian victory produced a strong psychological effect. The myth of Israeli invincibility was shaken. Shortly after the 1967 occupation, the resistance groups joined the same direction as the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) (created by an initiative of Nasser in 1964), and elected Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar) as president in 1969. The resistance took root in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and took part in all functions of life of Palestinians in exile: education, health, economy, local police, trade.