One thread, every collection
The Intifadas
1987 and 2000 — the uprisings, documented.
26 entries across 8 collections
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 Death of Yasser Arafat
2004
After two years confined by Israeli forces to his wrecked Ramallah compound, the PLO chairman dies in a French military hospital. The cause remains disputed; an era of Palestinian politics ends with him.
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 Founding of Hamas
1987
Two days into the intifada, seven Muslim Brotherhood leaders meet in Gaza City under Shaykh Ahmad Yasin and form the Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas — committing the Brotherhood to armed struggle.
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 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 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 Shooting of Naji al-Ali
1987
The cartoonist who drew Handala — the barefoot refugee child with his back turned — is shot in a London street. He dies five weeks before the intifada his child witness seemed to foretell.
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.
The UNLU and the Leaflets of the Uprising
1988
A clandestine Unified National Leadership — Fatah, PFLP, DFLP, and the Communists — begins issuing the numbered communiqués that set the rhythm of the First Intifada, strike day by strike day.
Abu Ali Mustafa
Secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine · 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.
Faisal al-Husseini
PLO Executive Committee member and head of Jerusalem affairs; founder of the Arab Studies Society at Orient House · 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)
Co-founder of Fatah and deputy commander-in-chief of the Palestinian revolution's forces · 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
General secretary of Fatah in the West Bank, imprisoned in Israel since 2002 · 1959–
The Fatah leader from Kobar, imprisoned since 2002 under five life sentences after an Inter-Parliamentary Union-appointed observer concluded that breaches of international law made a fair trial impossible and that guilt had not been established — an observer's conclusion, not a court acquittal.
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
Founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, assassinated in Gaza in 2004 · 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.
Sliman Mansour
Painter · 1947–
Palestinian painter whose images of porters, peasants, and olive trees made him a founding figure of contemporary Palestinian art.
Haydar Abd al-Shafi at Madrid: We Come to You From a Tortured Land
Haydar Abd al-Shafi
We come to you from a tortured land and a proud, though captive people, having been asked to negotiate with our occupiers, but leaving behind the children of the intifada, and a people under occupation and under curfew who enjoined us not to surrender or forget.
The Declaration of Independence, Algiers
Palestine National Council
The Palestine National Council hereby declares, in the Name of God and on behalf of the Palestinian Arab people, the establishment of the State of Palestine in the land of Palestine with its capital at Jerusalem.
The Islamic Resistance Movement
Hamas · founded 9 December 1987
Founded in Gaza City on the second day of the First Intifada by seven Muslim Brotherhood leaders around Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Its 1988 charter and its 2017 Document of General Principles say materially different things, and the movement issued the second itself, to restate its position.
The Palestinian National Initiative
al-Mubadara · founded 17 June 2002
Founded at the height of the Second Intifada by a physician, an elder statesman of Gaza and a literary critic dying in New York, on the argument that Palestinians needed a democratic third force between Fatah's corruption and Hamas's armed maximalism — and that the resistance most likely to succeed was unarmed.
The Palestinian People's Party
PPP · founded 1919 (as the Palestine Communist Party); refounded 1982; renamed 1991
The oldest continuous political current in Palestine, older than every other movement in this archive. It began among Jewish and Arab workers in Jaffa in 1919, split on the national question, was the only Palestinian party to accept the 1947 partition plan, and organised the trade unions that made the First Intifada possible.
The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising
UNLU · founded 8 January 1988
An anonymous committee of four factions that ran the First Intifada by leaflet. Its bayanat — numbered communiqués, photocopied and passed hand to hand — set the strike days, the boycott, the school hours and the funeral discipline of an entire population for six years, and no one who signed them was ever named.
Where this thread crosses others
Counted on records the two threads actually share, not on words they have in common.
A thread is a reading order, not a boundary — every record above belongs to other threads too.