Yasser Arafat - Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini ياسر عرفات

During the 1980s, Arafat received financial assistance from Libya, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which allowed him to reconstruct the badly-battered PLO.

This was particularly useful during the First Intifada in December 1987, which began as an uprising of Palestinian youth against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The word Intifada in Arabic is literally translated as "tremor", however, it is generally defined as an uprising or revolt.

The first stage of the Intifada was a response to an incident at the Erez checkpoint where an Israeli military vehicle hit a group of Palestinian laborers, killing four of them. However, within weeks and partly upon consistent requests by Abu Jihad, Arafat attempted to direct the uprising, which lasted until 1992–93. Abu Jihad had previously been assigned the responsibility of the Palestinian territories within the PLO command and according to biographer Said Aburish, had "impressive knowledge of local conditions" in the Israeli-occupied territories. On April 16, 1988, as the Intifada was raging, Abu Jihad was assassinated in his Tunis household, allegedly by an Israeli hit squad. Arafat considered Abu Jihad a PLO counterweight to local Palestinian leadership, and led a funeral procession for him in Damascus.

The most common tactic used by Palestinians during the Intifada was throwing stones at IDF tanks, which became a symbol of the uprising. The local leadership in some West Bank towns commenced non-violent protests against Israeli occupation by engaging in tax resistance and other boycotts. Israel responded by confiscating large sums of money in house-to-house raids. As the Intifada came to a close, new armed Palestinian groups — in particular Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) — began targeting Israeli civilians with the new tactic of suicide bombing and internal fighting amongst the Palestinians increased dramatically.