First Intifada
Based on Wikipedia: First Intifada
A Traffic Accident That Changed History
On December 8, 1987, an Israeli truck crashed into a row of cars at the Erez checkpoint in Gaza. The vehicles were carrying Palestinian laborers heading home after a day's work in Israel. Four men died. Seven more were seriously injured. Hundreds of workers witnessed the collision.
By that evening, ten thousand people had gathered at the Jabalya refugee camp for the funerals. The camp was the largest of eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, home to families who had fled or been expelled from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948.
A rumor spread through the crowd: the crash was no accident. Two days earlier, an Israeli businessman had been stabbed to death while shopping in Gaza. The truck collision, people whispered, was deliberate retaliation.
Israel denied any connection. The crash came at a moment of extreme tension, but officials insisted it was simply a terrible traffic accident.
It didn't matter. The next morning, Palestinian teenagers began throwing stones at Israeli military vehicles. Soldiers opened fire. A seventeen-year-old named Hatem Al-Sesi was killed. Sixteen others were wounded.
What followed would reshape the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades to come. The First Intifada—the word means "uprising" or "shaking off" in Arabic—had begun.
Twenty Years of Occupation
To understand why a traffic accident could ignite a sustained rebellion, you need to understand what life had become for Palestinians in the occupied territories.
In June 1967, Israel fought a war against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria that lasted just six days. When the shooting stopped, Israel controlled the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The latter three territories were home to roughly a million Palestinians who suddenly found themselves living under military occupation.
By 1987, that occupation was approaching its twentieth anniversary. An entire generation had grown up knowing nothing else.
Israel had opened its labor market to Palestinians from the territories, recruiting them for unskilled and semi-skilled jobs that Israelis didn't want. By the time of the Intifada, more than forty percent of the Palestinian workforce crossed into Israel daily for work. They built Israeli houses, cleaned Israeli streets, and harvested Israeli crops, then returned each evening to territories where they had no political rights and lived under military law.
The economic situation was suffocating. Israel expropriated Palestinian land for settlements. Birth rates were high. Land allocation for new Palestinian construction was severely limited. Population density grew. Unemployment rose. Even a university degree offered little hope—only one in eight college-educated Palestinians could find work related to their field of study.
Yet paradoxically, the occupation period had seen a dramatic expansion of Palestinian higher education. New universities opened their doors to students from refugee camps, villages, and small towns. These institutions produced a new Palestinian elite drawn from lower social strata—young people who were more confrontational and more willing to act than the traditional leadership.
The Iron Fist
Israel's approach to Palestinian unrest was called the "Iron Fist" policy. It meant collective punishment.
Deportations. Home demolitions. Curfews that confined entire communities to their houses. Suppression of political organizations and educational institutions. Mass arrests and detention without trial.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris, writing about what caused the Intifada, described what he called "the all-pervading element of humiliation." The occupation, he wrote, was "always a brutal and mortifying experience for the occupied" and "founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation."
Meanwhile, Israeli settlements in the West Bank were expanding rapidly. The Jewish settler population nearly doubled between 1984 and 1988, growing from thirty-five thousand to sixty-four thousand. By the mid-nineties it would reach one hundred thirty thousand. An Israeli government minister admitted that "a creeping process of de facto annexation" was underway.
Some mainstream Israeli politicians began openly discussing the idea of "transfer"—a euphemism for expelling the Palestinian population from the territories entirely. The Deputy Defense Minister, Cabinet members, and government ministers all made public statements suggesting this possibility. Palestinians heard these statements and understood that their very presence in their homeland was being questioned.
Kindling Before the Spark
The December 1987 truck collision is usually cited as the catalyst for the First Intifada, but tensions had been building throughout the year.
In December 1986, Israeli soldiers shot two Gaza students at Birzeit University. The response was harsh: summary arrests, detention, systematic beatings of handcuffed Palestinian youths. Some two hundred fifty people were held in four cells inside a converted army camp outside Gaza City, known as Ansar 11.
In early 1987, a deportation policy was introduced to intimidate activists. A schoolboy from Khan Yunis was shot dead by Israeli soldiers who pursued him in a jeep.
Over the summer, violence escalated. An Israeli lieutenant responsible for guarding detainees at Ansar 11 was shot at point-blank range while stuck in Gaza traffic. Israel responded by imposing a three-day curfew—during the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, one of the most important celebrations in the Muslim calendar.
In October, Israeli forces ambushed and killed seven Gaza men who had escaped from prison. Days later, a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl named Intisar al-Attar was shot in the back while standing in her schoolyard. The shooter was an Israeli settler who claimed the girl had been throwing stones.
At the Arab summit in Amman that November, the Palestinian issue was pushed aside for the first time in years. The gathered leaders were focused on the Iran-Iraq War. Palestinians felt abandoned by the broader Arab world.
Israeli authorities believed Palestinian resistance was exhausted. They were confident the situation was under control.
They were wrong.
Stones Against Soldiers
The Intifada was not a coordinated military operation. It was a popular uprising, and its weapons were the weapons of the unarmed: stones, boycotts, strikes, and refusal.
Palestinian youths took control of their neighborhoods. They blocked streets with garbage, rocks, and burning tires. When Israeli soldiers tried to break through, they were met with petrol bombs. Shopkeepers closed their businesses. Workers refused to show up at their jobs in Israel.
The uprising targeted specific symbols of the occupation: military vehicles, Israeli buses, Israeli banks. In the early weeks, none of the dozen Israeli settlements in Gaza were attacked. No Israelis died from stone-throwing at cars.
What made the Intifada unprecedented was the scale of participation. Tens of thousands of ordinary civilians joined the protests—not just young men, but women and children. The entire population seemed to be rising up at once.
Israel responded with overwhelming force. Soldiers used clubs, nightsticks, tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. But the disturbances only grew.
Within days, protests had spread from Gaza into the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians threw rocks. Israeli soldiers shot them. More funerals became more protests became more funerals.
The Brutality of Suppression
Israel deployed approximately eighty thousand soldiers to suppress the uprising. In the first thirteen months alone, three hundred thirty-two Palestinians and twelve Israelis were killed.
Human Rights Watch criticized Israel's response as disproportionate. Soldiers frequently used live ammunition against protesters, even when confronting crowds of unarmed civilians and teenagers. Images of soldiers beating adolescents with clubs circulated around the world, generating international outrage.
In response to the criticism, Israel shifted to using semi-lethal plastic bullets. This reduced fatalities somewhat but did nothing to change the fundamental dynamics of the confrontation.
The Defense Minister at the time was Yitzhak Rabin, who would later become Prime Minister and sign the Oslo Accords. He adopted what he called a policy of "might, power and beatings." The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that between twenty-three thousand and thirty thousand Palestinian children required medical treatment for beating injuries in just the first two years of the uprising. One-third of these injured children were under ten years old.
Mass arrests were routine. Estimates vary—some sources say fifty-seven thousand Palestinians were arrested over the course of the Intifada, others say one hundred twenty thousand. By 1990, the Ktzi'ot Prison in the Negev desert held approximately one out of every fifty males over age sixteen from the West Bank and Gaza.
Universities were shut down. Hebron University was closed from January 1988 to June 1991. Schools across the territories were shuttered for a total of twelve months. Round-the-clock curfews were imposed over sixteen hundred times in just the first year. At any given moment, twenty-five thousand Palestinians might be confined to their homes.
Communities were cut off from water, electricity, and fuel. Trees were uprooted on Palestinian farms. Agricultural produce was blocked from being sold. In the first year, over one thousand Palestinian families had their homes either demolished or sealed shut.
The Toll
The numbers tell a story of asymmetry.
Over the six years of the First Intifada, Israeli forces killed between 1,087 and 1,284 Palestinians. Of these, at least 240 were children. In the Gaza Strip alone during the first year, 142 Palestinians were killed while no Israelis died. Seventy-seven were shot. Thirty-seven died from tear gas inhalation. Seventeen were beaten to death by Israeli police or soldiers.
On the Israeli side, approximately 100 civilians and 60 soldiers were killed over the course of the uprising. More than 1,400 Israeli civilians and 1,700 soldiers were injured.
But the violence wasn't only between Israelis and Palestinians. A dark feature of the Intifada was intra-Palestinian violence. An estimated 822 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians as alleged collaborators with Israel. The accusation of collaboration was sometimes accurate—Israel reportedly obtained information from around eighteen thousand Palestinians who had been "compromised" in various ways—but fewer than half of those labeled as collaborators had any proven contact with Israeli authorities. Many executions were score-settling disguised as patriotism.
Resistance Beyond Violence
The Intifada was not only about stones and Molotov cocktails. Much of the uprising was nonviolent—a systematic campaign of civil disobedience and economic resistance.
Palestinians organized general strikes, shutting down businesses and bringing commerce to a halt. They boycotted Israeli Civil Administration institutions, refusing to cooperate with the occupation's bureaucratic structures. They refused to buy Israeli products. They refused to work in Israeli settlements. They refused to pay taxes.
Some Palestinians even refused to drive cars with Israeli-issued license plates, a small act of defiance that symbolized a larger rejection of occupation.
The civil disobedience was coordinated by an underground leadership called the United National Leadership of the Uprising, or UNLU. This committee issued leaflets with instructions for strikes and protests, creating a degree of organization in what was otherwise a largely spontaneous popular movement.
Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian American psychologist who had founded the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, had been among the keenest advocates for nonviolent struggle in the years before the uprising. He described the Intifada as a protest against Israeli repression: "beatings, shootings, killings, house demolitions, uprooting of trees, deportations, extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial."
The nonviolent dimension of the Intifada is often overlooked, but it was central to the movement's power. A population throwing stones can be labeled as rioters. A population on general strike, refusing to cooperate with occupation at any level, is something harder to dismiss.
The World Watches
The Intifada changed how the world saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For decades, the dominant narrative had focused on Palestinian terrorism—airplane hijackings, the Munich Olympics massacre, attacks on civilians. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, was widely viewed as a terrorist organization. Israel was seen as a small democracy defending itself against Arab aggression.
The images from the Intifada told a different story. Here were unarmed teenagers throwing rocks. Here were soldiers beating children with clubs. Here were families weeping over bodies at funerals that turned into the next day's protests.
The asymmetry was visible and visceral. Palestinians were David; Israel was Goliath.
This shift in perception had consequences. International criticism of Israel's response mounted. Gerald Kaufman, a British Jewish politician and longtime supporter of Israel, spoke for many when he said that "friends of Israel as well as foes have been shocked and saddened by that country's response to the disturbances."
The uprising also reshaped Palestinian politics. The PLO leadership was in exile in Tunisia, far from the events on the ground. The Intifada was being led by people inside the territories—a new generation that hadn't asked permission from the old guard. The PLO had to adapt or risk being left behind by its own people.
The Road to Oslo
The First Intifada is generally dated from December 1987 to 1991 or 1993, depending on how you measure its end.
In 1991, the Madrid Conference brought Israelis and Palestinians together for direct negotiations for the first time. This was a significant breakthrough, though the talks themselves produced little concrete progress.
More consequential were the secret negotiations that followed. In 1993, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords, a set of agreements that established the Palestinian Authority and created a framework for Palestinian self-governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. The accords were meant to be the first step toward a final peace agreement.
That final agreement never came. The Oslo process gradually collapsed over the following years, undermined by continued settlement expansion, Palestinian attacks, political assassinations, and mutual distrust. In 2000, a Second Intifada erupted—far bloodier than the first, marked by suicide bombings and massive Israeli military operations.
But that's another story.
What the First Intifada Meant
The First Intifada demonstrated that an unarmed population could challenge a military occupation through mass resistance. The stones thrown by Palestinian teenagers couldn't defeat the Israeli army, but they could change the political equation.
The uprising showed that the status quo was unsustainable. Israel could not simply hold the territories indefinitely while their population grew more restive. Something had to give.
It also revealed the limits of military force against a popular movement. Israel deployed eighty thousand soldiers, killed over a thousand people, arrested tens of thousands more, demolished thousands of homes—and still couldn't crush the uprising. The Palestinians had found a form of resistance that couldn't be bombed into submission.
For Palestinians, the Intifada was a moment of collective agency after two decades of occupation. They had risen up together, resisted together, suffered together. Whatever came next, they had proven to themselves and the world that they would not accept their situation quietly.
For Israelis, the Intifada was a shock. Many had believed that Palestinians had accepted the occupation, or at least resigned themselves to it. The uprising shattered that illusion. It forced a reckoning with what occupation actually meant—not just for the occupied, but for the occupiers.
The Israeli historian Shlomo Ben-Ami later wrote that the Intifada was, in part, a rebellion against the PLO itself—against an exiled leadership that had failed to deliver results through diplomacy or terrorism. The people in the territories were taking matters into their own hands.
The Accident That Wasn't
Was the December 1987 truck collision really an accident?
Israel insists it was. The timing was terrible—tensions were already at a breaking point—but there's no evidence of deliberate intent.
Most historians accept this account while acknowledging that the truth hardly mattered. By December 1987, the occupied territories were a tinderbox. If not that truck, something else would have sparked the explosion. The conditions for uprising had been building for years.
Some scholars argue that the Intifada actually began earlier, with youth demonstrations in November 1987. Others point to a Palestinian guerrilla operation called the "Night of the Gliders" in late November, when Palestinian fighters crossed into Israel using hang gliders and killed six Israeli soldiers. The perceived failure of the Israeli military to prevent this attack may have emboldened Palestinians to believe that resistance was possible.
In the end, the First Intifada had no single beginning and no clean ending. It emerged from accumulated grievances and erupted when those grievances became unbearable. It subsided not because it was defeated, but because the political landscape shifted beneath it.
The Palestinians who threw stones in December 1987 were the children and grandchildren of refugees from 1948. Their own children and grandchildren continue to live with the consequences of that unresolved history. The truck collision at Erez checkpoint is now nearly four decades in the past. The conflict it helped intensify is still with us.