The Intifadas
1987 and 2000 — the uprisings, documented.
28 entries across 8 collections
Research1
Figures6
Abu Ali Mustafa
1938–2001
Mustafa al-Zabri, the peasant's son who spent five years in a desert prison and thirty-two in exile, returned in 1999 to lead the PFLP and was killed by an Israeli missile in his Ramallah office.
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
1936–2004
The quadriplegic refugee preacher from al-Jura who founded Hamas in December 1987 and was killed by Israeli helicopter missiles as he left dawn prayers in Gaza on 22 March 2004.
Faisal al-Husseini
1940–2001
Son of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, known as the Lion of Jerusalem — he built Orient House into the PLO's political address in the occupied city and defended its Arab identity until his death in 2001.
Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad)
1935–1988
Expelled from Ramla at twelve, he co-founded Fatah in Kuwait in 1959, ran its operations inside occupied Palestine, helped architect the First Intifada, and was assassinated by an Israeli commando unit in Tunis in 1988.
Marwan Barghouti
1959–
The Fatah leader from Kobar, imprisoned since 2002 under five life sentences after a trial an Inter-Parliamentary Union inquiry found riddled with breaches of international law — and, in poll after poll, the most popular Palestinian politician.
Sliman Mansour
1947–
Palestinian painter whose images of porters, peasants, and olive trees made him a founding figure of contemporary Palestinian art.
Timeline8
The Buraq Uprising
1929
A year-long dispute over access to al-Buraq — the Western Wall — erupted in August 1929 into violence that spread from Jerusalem to Hebron and Safed. The Shaw Commission counted 133 Jews and 116 Arabs killed; many of the Arab casualties, it found, were caused by rifle fire from the police and military.
The Palestinian Declaration of Independence
1988
Meeting in Algiers, the Palestine National Council proclaims the State of Palestine and accepts UN Resolutions 242 and 338 — a de facto two-state formula.
The First Intifada
1987–1993
A mass popular uprising erupts in Gaza and spreads across the occupied territories, defined by strikes, boycotts, and stone-throwing youth.
The Great Arab Revolt
1936–1939
A nationwide uprising against British colonial rule and mass immigration, beginning with a six-month general strike and crushed by overwhelming military force.
The ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Wall
2004
On 9 July 2004 the International Court of Justice found that the wall Israel was building inside the occupied West Bank was contrary to international law, that Israel must stop building it, dismantle what stood and make reparation — and that other states must not recognise the situation it created.
The Battle of Jenin
2002
The fiercest battle of Operation Defensive Shield leaves the heart of Jenin refugee camp in ruins — and a bitter dispute over the death toll.
The Second Intifada
2000–2005
Ariel Sharon's visit to the Haram al-Sharif ignites a far more violent uprising that leaves several thousand Palestinians and around a thousand Israelis dead.
The Unity Intifada and the May War on Gaza
2021
Protests over Sheikh Jarrah and raids on Al-Aqsa ignite a rare uprising across all of historic Palestine — and an eleven-day escalation in Gaza.
Culture1
Poems2
Enough for Me
Fadwa Touqan
Touqan's brief late poem asks for one thing only — to die on her country's soil and remain there as dust, grass, and a flower. Its lines are carved on her gravestone in Nablus.
On This Earth
Mahmoud Darwish
A litany of small, ordinary reasons to live — bread at dawn, grass on a stone — that ends by naming Palestine as the Lady of Earth and declaring 'I deserve life.'
Glossary1
Memory7
Al-Kabri
Acre
Al-Kabri was a stone village northeast of Acre whose famous springs supplied the city's water through Ottoman aqueducts. Punished for the ambush of the Yehiam convoy, it was occupied in Operation Ben-Ami in May 1948 and leveled; today only rubble and the cemetery remain, beside the kibbutz that took its name.
Al-Qabu
Jerusalem
Al-Qabu was a small hilltop village west of Jerusalem, its stone houses ringed by terraces of olives and grain. Captured in October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har, it was destroyed, and moshav Mevo Betar was later built on its lands.
Al-Shaykh Muwannis
Jaffa
Al-Shaykh Muwannis stood on a sandstone rise north of the Awja river, a citrus village of 1,930 people holding 15,972 dunums in 1944/45, whose leaders had reached a truce understanding with the Haganah. In March 1948 the Irgun kidnapped five of its notables; the village emptied on 30 March. Tel Aviv University stands on its land, and the sheikh's Green House is the university's faculty club.
Kafr Bir'im
Safad
Kafr Bir'im was a Maronite stone-built village in the Upper Galilee, surrounded by gardens, olive groves, and vineyards. Its people were ordered out in November 1948 on a promise of return; instead the village was bombed in 1953, and only its church and bell tower still stand above the ruins.
Lifta
Jerusalem
Lifta, at the western gateway to Jerusalem, was emptied of its roughly 3,000 residents in the first months of 1948. Its stone houses still stand in the valley below the highway, making it the most visibly surviving depopulated Palestinian village and a focus of return and preservation campaigns.
Suba
Jerusalem
Suba stood on a conical hill above the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, its stone houses built among the ruins of a Crusader castle. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Danny, it survives as one of the more complete village ruins in the Jerusalem corridor, within a national park beside Kibbutz Tzova.
Umm Khalid
Tulkarm
Umm Khalid stood on a sandstone hill less than two kilometres from the sea, on the site of the Crusader Castellum Rogerii Langobardi, with 970 people and 2,894 dunums in 1944/45. Netanya was founded on its land in 1929 and grew around it. An Israeli intelligence report records that the village was evacuated on 20 March 1948 out of a general sense of fear; villagers described a month of blockade beforehand.
Places2
Jabalia
Gaza Strip
Jabalia, the market town on the rise northeast of Gaza City, became after 1948 the site of the largest refugee camp in the Strip; the first intifada began in its alleys in December 1987, and the war since 2023 has returned to it again and again.
Safed
Upper Galilee
Safed — Safad, the city on the hill — was a Galilee town of mystics, weavers and rebels until May 1948, when nearly all of its roughly ten thousand Palestinians fled or were driven out as the town fell. Its stone Arab quarter survives as an artists' colony, and its refugees carry Safad with them still.