The First Intifada

The first intifada — Arabic for “shaking off” — began on 9 December 1987 in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, a day after an Israeli truck collided with a car carrying Palestinian workers, killing four. Within days, demonstrations spread across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The uprising was largely unarmed and grassroots-led: general strikes, commercial boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, and confrontations in which Palestinian youths threw stones at soldiers. A clandestine Unified National Leadership coordinated the movement, while new committees organized food, education, and mutual aid. Hamas emerged in the uprising’s first days as an Islamist rival to the PLO.

Over six years, Israeli forces killed more than a thousand Palestinians, and Palestinians killed around two hundred Israelis, according to B’Tselem. The intifada transformed international perception of the conflict and set the stage for the PLO’s 1988 Declaration of Independence in Algiers, the 1991 Madrid Conference, and ultimately the Oslo process.