Five days into the intifada, however, a new group emerged from the same Gaza refugee camp that had spawned the uprising. It would be called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. Its leader, a crippled, bearded, middle-aged man named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had fled with his family from the village of al-Jora in 1948; the village was later destroyed and the Israeli city of Ashkelon built on its rubble.
