During the First Intifada, the Palestinian Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) distributed regular communiqués directing the activities of the uprising and setting out its political stances. According to Thayer Hastings of the CUNY Graduate Center, the UNLU communiqués were "key political texts of the Intifada era." Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has described the communiqués as "both as a newspaper and a manual for the intifada."
Background.
On 9 December 1987, an Israeli truck driver collided with and killed four Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp. The incident sparked the largest wave of Palestinian unrest since the Israeli occupation began in 1967: the First Intifada. During the early stages, the Intifada was largely characterised by a non-violent campaign, with actions including labour strikes, tax strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, boycotts of Israeli institutions, demonstrations, the establishment of underground classrooms and cooperatives, raisings of the banned Palestinian flag, and civil disobedience. The actions were led by the led by a decentralised leadership composed of the grassroots organisations of the PLO, such as labour unions, student councils, and women's committees, who organised themselves into the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), mainly outside of the direct control of the PLO leadership, who were mostly in exile or imprisoned (or had been killed by Israeli forces over the preceding years).
The Israeli government responded to the breakout of the Intifada with a harsh crackdown, however, with Minister of Defence Yitzhak Rabin pledging to suppress it using "force, might, and beatings," including ordering Israeli soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian protestors, imposing widespread lockdowns on Palestinian cities, mass arrests, and demolitions of Palestinian houses. During the later stages of the Intifada, as the Israeli crackdown severely damaged the Palestinian economy and morale, and as the PLO leadership in exile attempted to take on greater day-to-day control over the Intifada, the UNLU began to lose control over the uprising and the uprising grew more violent during its last stages, including Palestinian internal political violence against rumoured collaborators. By the end of the Intifada, over a thousand Palestinians had been killed and over a hundred thousand injured by Israeli forces, with around two hundred Israelis having been killed by Palestinians. The First Intifada would come to an end with several high-profile peace negotiations, including the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Overview.
The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) was a collective of Palestinian local leaders during the First Intifada. Emerging from the grassroots civilian associations that had proliferated in Palestine in the 1980s and the local branches of Palestinian Liberation Organisation groups, the UNLU operated clandestinely and played the leading role in directing the Intifada. Its major activity was to issue leaflets containing communiqués describing the actions Palestinians should take to support the Intifada in the following two weeks. The communiqués focused on tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance, particularly via strike action and boycotts. 
The leaflets were printed in a decentralised manner, including sometimes in the homes of UNLU activists, and distributed by UNLU activists and local youth. According to Ziad Abu-Amr of Birzeit University, "representatives of the groups [comprising the UNLU] would generally discuss the substance of the leaflets. Then, for practical reasons, one group at a time would take the responsibility to draft and print them. This gave the group in charge a certain amount of freedom to make minor alterations, bringing the text more in line with its ideological and political persuasion," which sometimes caused disagreement among the UNLU factions, but substantial differences of opinion mostly led to the individual factions releasing their own, separate communiqués in conjunction with the UNLU communiqués. 
According to Lee O'Brien and Penny Johnson of the Middle East Research and Information Project, writing in Spring 1988:In the occupied West Bank these days, people walk around with their eyes lowered to the ground. This posture is not to avoid the attention of the incessant military patrols, or to avert one’s eyes from witnessing their physical violence and harassment which are, still somehow shockingly, often carried out in full view. (A street scene, February 12, in Ramallah: After a small demonstration, soldiers detain a young man, cover his head with a makeshift hood and beat him. One red-haired soldier, with a fresh face and wire-rimmed glasses like a bright college student, repeatedly returns to kick the prisoner. Soldiers shout at people staring silently from the windows of their houses: “Go away.” If the watchers do not vanish quickly, soldiers hurl stones at the windows.) Neither do the downcast eyes indicate a population weary after 12 weeks of an uprising that has left over 100 dead, many hundreds injured, and thousands detained. The collective mood is almost electrifyingly high. Rather, people look down to spot the latest statement from the United Leadership Committee for the Uprising, often found in the streets or tucked under a windshield or door. For the first time in many years, words have a direct bearing on individual and collective action. People shape their daily lives around the announcements of general strikes, demonstrations from churches and mosques, and “assignments” to different sectors of the population. In mid-February, people rejoiced as “Statement Number Seven” came out on schedule, despite an army raid on an ‘Isawiyya print shop suspected of producing the statements.
In response to the UNLU's use of leaflets, the Israeli government hightened censorship in the Palestinian Territories, including arresting Palestinians caught carrying the leaflets. The Israeli military further ordered all printing presses in the Gaza Strip to register with the military and obtain approval to continue operations. 
Analysis.
According to Ziad Abu-Amr of Birzeit University, the communiqués "did not emanate from an overall clear and planned strategy of which each leaflet was an integral component, but rather dealt with the situation as it unfolded and tried to capitalise on it, guided by the broader national objectives," notably "the right to self-determination and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state under the leadership of the PLO." 
The UNLU also prioritised non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation in its communiqués - a study by the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence found that 95% of the actions called for in the UNLU's first 17 communiqués were non-violent, and over 90% in the next 22 communiqués, with the calls that were violent limited to less-lethal violence such as stone-throwing.
J. Kristen Urban of Mount St. Mary's University has argued that the communiqués served as a ""de facto" Constitution for a people in the process of nation-building." According to Urban, the communiqués also reflected the growing subordination of the UNLU to the PLO central leadership in Tunisia over the course of the Intifada, with the first 14 communiqués each containing only one direct reference to the PLO, but with the number of references substantially increasing in later communiqués, and with the content of the later communiqués containing increased appeals to the international community. Urban also notes a substantial shift away from the political left starting with Communiqué No. 41, after which point the communiqués warned Palestinians only to act based on "central decision by the higher command."