‘Unpopular Front For Liberation Of Palestine’ Not Causing Trouble

Tel Aviv, August 26 – Officials in Israel’s security apparatus are noting that in the ongoing conflict with Palestinian terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip, the Unpopular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has been silent.

While Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other militant groups have featured to varying degrees in the fighting, the Unpopular Front has, according to Israeli military analysts, failed to effectively recruit new members in numbers sufficient to conduct operations. Even Fatah, the PLO faction led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has boasted of participation in launching rockets and mortars at Israeli towns, while the UFLP has remained unrepresented on the battlefield.

Unpopular Front leader Askfr Awedji was unavailable for comment. A spokesman, Ayama Bignrd, asked that his name not be used in connection with the inquiry, but was clearly too wimpy to enforce that condition. Bignrd said that Awedji would be able to offer comment as soon as he disentangled himself from the bathroom faucet where several larger militants from Hamas had bound him by the elastic band of his underwear.

Israeli experts note that the Unpopular Front has had difficulty recruiting new members to its ranks for some time. “In the early 1980’s there was a brief period when the Unpopular Front became popular, coinciding with the arrival of the movie Revenge of the Nerds in Middle East theaters,” said Colonel Rick Moranis of the Israeli Counterterrorism Institute. “But that proved short-lived, and even the newer arrivals such as Hamas have been able to muscle the UFLP off the stage.” Hamas was founded in the late 1980’s.

While the familiar green flags of Hamas fly all over the Gaza Strip and in parts of the West Bank, observers have not seen the yellow banner of the Unpopular Front, with its characteristic logo of Kalashnikov rifles forming a pair of black-rim glasses held together by masking tape. Longtime Khan Younis refugee camp resident Ahma Bulli said that the few UFLP members he had known over the years did not seem capable of handling weapons with any competence, and certainly not the bravado necessary for membership in the other, more prominent resistance organizations. “They tend to be loners, and they’re less likely to look at the girl walking by in a flattering hijab than they are to be working on some puzzle or technical project.”

For a time, Hamas and Islamic Jihad recruited several members of the Unpopular Front in technical capacities, but when word got out to rival Palestinian factions that the “untouchable” UFLP members, as Bulli called them, had been granted access to the exclusive club of other organizations, social pressure forced them to let the Unpopular activists go.

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