• Driving force of the Palestinians’ second Intifada
• Many of its individual militias are named for Palestinian suicide bombers
• Associated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction

Established in 2000, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades are composed of numerous West Bank militias affiliated with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's secular, nationalist Fatah faction, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Brigades constitute the military wing of Fatah. Many of the individual militias that make up the Brigades are named after recently killed Palestinian militants and terrorists.

The Brigades were a driving force behind the second Palestinian Intifada. Though they initially vowed to attack only Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in early 2002 they initiated a spree of attacks against civilians in Israeli cities, causing the U.S. State Department to add the Brigades to its list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Named after one of Islam's holy sites (the Al-Aqsa Mosque located atop the contested Jerusalem location known by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount), the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades were intrinsic to Arafat’s strategies. In June 2002, Israeli intelligence reports showed that Arafat had approved a $20,000 payment to the Brigades -- refuting his repeated claims that he had no influence on their activities.

According to Palestinian officials, most of the Brigades’ members are on the payroll of the Palestinian Authority, as they serve in both the Brigades and in any of the government’s fourteen security services.

Among the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades' recent acts of violence are the following:

• An October 2005 suicide attack at the Gush Etzion junction that killed three Israelis and wounded three others
• A March 2004 suicide bombing at a checkpoint at the Port of Ashdod that killed ten people
• A January 2004 attack on a bus in Rehavia, Jerusalem that killed eleven people
• Two January 2003 suicide bombings in Tel Aviv that killed 23 people and injured approximately 100 more
• A November 2002 shooting spree at a kibbutz in northern Israel that killed five Israelis and wounded seven more
• A March 2002 suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed three Israelis
• A March 2002 suicide bombing in a Jerusalem café that killed 11 Israelis and wounded more than 50
• A March 2002 sniper attack on an Israeli army checkpoint in the West Bank that killed 10 Israelis
• A January 2002 suicide attack in Jerusalem that killed one person and wounded some 40 others

In a November 2005 leaflet, the Brigades expressed support for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call "to wipe Israel off [the] world map." "We stress our support of the Iranian President's position toward the fictitious Zionist state, which will disappear with the help of Allah," read the leaflet.  "… The acknowledgement of the State of Israel, the state that was established on Palestinian land, constitutes contempt of the Palestinian people, who sacrifice their blood every day for the sake of freeing Palestine and Jerusalem."

In a leaflet distributed in the Gaza Strip in late June 2006, the Brigades announced that they had succeeded in manufacturing at least twenty different types of chemical and biological weapons. Moreover, they warned that they would load the new weapons on the Kassam rockets that were being fired at Israeli communities on an almost daily basis. They also threatened to use the weapons against IDF soldiers if Israel carried out its threats to invade the Gaza Strip in retaliation for recent Kassam bombings, terrorist attacks, and the June 2006 kidnapping of an IDF soldier: "We will surprise you with our new weapons the moment the first soldier sets foot in the Gaza Strip."

In April 2007, Abu Ahmed, the northern Gaza leader of the Brigades, acknowledged his organization's "warm relations with Hezbollah." "We don't have anything to be ashamed of," he added, "that we are dealing with Hezbollah and that we are receiving training and information from them."