Though the signing of the accords garnered Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, and Shimon Peres the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, it quickly became clear that they had been stillborn. First, there were groups among both the Palestinians and Israelis that saw the accords as an act of treason. On the Palestinian side, the signing of the accords helped pave the way towards the rise of Hamas, a radical Islamist alternative to PLO that considered the accords an act of treason. On the Israeli side, they lead to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by an Israeli extremist, who similarly saw Oslo as caving to Palestinian demands. Second, the accords were unable to stop the violence that both sides were perpetrating against each other, and third, they did not really clarify important issues such as the current and future state of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the status of Jerusalem, or the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. The final blow to the accords came in September 2000 with the start of the Second Intifada. It was triggered by the ‘visit’ of Ariel Sharon, then leader of the Likud Party, to Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount), where he declared the holy site a part of the Jewish state. With that Israeli-Palestinian relations tumbled yet again into a spiral of violence.