George Habash (Arabic: جورج حبش‎) also known by his laqab "al-Hakim" (Arabic:الحكيم — the wise one or the doctor) (August 2, 1926 – January 26, 2008) was a Palestinian Christian who founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Habash served as Secretary-General of the Palestine Front until 2000, when ill-health forced him to resign.

Habash was born in Lydda (today's Lod) to an Eastern Orthodox Palestinian family. As a child, he sang in the church choir. Habash, a medical student at the American University of Beirut, was visiting his family during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In July 1948, the Israeli Defence Force captured Lydda from Jordanian and Arab Liberation Army forces. Habash and his family became refugees and were not allowed to return home.

In 1951, after graduating first in his class from medical school, Habash worked in refugee camps in Jordan, and ran a clinic with Wadie Haddad in Amman. He firmly believed that the state of Israel should be ended by all possible means, including political violence. In an effort to recruit the Arab world to this cause, Habash founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) in 1951 and aligned the organization with Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalist ideology.

Bassam Abu Sharif (born 1946) is a former senior adviser to the late Yasser Arafat and press officer of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Formerly a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Abu Sharif was dubbed the "face of terror" by Time Magazine for his role in the Dawson's Field hijackings in 1970, when the PFLP hijacked Pan Am, Swissair, and TWA flights — a fourth pair of hijackers on an El Al flight were overpowered by security guards and passengers — and blew them up in the Jordanian desert, triggering King Hussein's expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, which became known as Black September.

He lost four fingers, and was left deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, when a bomb exploded in his hands in Beirut, Lebanon in 1972. The assassination attempt was carried out by Mossad who hid the explosives in the book The Memoirs of Che Guevara, and sent the book to Sharif.

Within PFLP, he began to favor a reduced emphasis on armed struggle and closer cooperation with Fatah, the dominant PLO faction. As a result, he was removed from the PFLP Politburo in 1981, and demoted running external relations. In drawing closer to Fatah leader Yasir Arafat and meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, he was expelled from the PFLP in 1987. In a non-partisan role, he became an advisor to Arafat and was able to float some peace proposals based on a two-state solution and preparing Palestinians for the compromises made in Oslo. He returned to Ramallah in 1996 as a presidential advisor and often writing unofficial statements of the Palestinian position in the peace process.