Category: History & Politics Key figures: Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU, PLO-affiliated coordination body), Yasser Arafat (PLO Chairman), Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (co-founder of Hamas), Yitzhak Rabin (Israeli Defence Minister)
The First Intifada — Arabic for “shaking off” — was a large-scale Palestinian uprising against Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem that began in December 1987 and lasted until September 1993. It marked the first sustained, organized mass resistance by the Palestinian population within the occupied territories since the Israeli occupation began following the 1967 Six-Day War.
The immediate trigger was a traffic accident on December 8, 1987, at the Erez checkpoint on the border between Israel and Gaza: an Israeli truck collided with a van carrying Palestinian workers from the Jabalia refugee camp, killing four men. Palestinians widely believed the crash was a deliberate act of revenge for the stabbing of an Israeli businessman two days earlier in Gaza City. Spontaneous protests erupted in Jabalia the following day, December 9, and spread rapidly across Gaza and the West Bank within hours.
The uprising’s deeper causes had accumulated over two decades. By 1987, Israel’s occupation had reached its twentieth year, and the population of the Gaza Strip — one of the most densely settled territories on earth — had grown to approximately 650,000 people under military rule. Palestinians faced routine land expropriation for Israeli settlements, which had expanded substantially after the 1977 Likud electoral victory, as well as economic marginalization, arbitrary detention, deportation, and restrictions on political organization. An educated Palestinian youth cohort with no political outlet channeled mounting frustration into the uprising.
The intifada was characterized in its early phase by civil disobedience: commercial strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, refusal to work in Israel, mass demonstrations, and stone-throwing against Israeli military patrols. Palestinian youth organized in neighborhood committees coordinated through the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), an umbrella group of PLO-affiliated factions. As the occupation’s response hardened — Israel’s “iron fist” policy, ordered by Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin, included beatings, curfews, and mass arrests — resistance escalated to include Molotov cocktails and, eventually, firearms. The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in December 1987 partly in response to the intifada, emerged as a significant rival to the secular PLO inside the territories.
Approximately 1,100–1,200 Palestinians were killed over the course of the intifada, including more than 240 children; approximately 160–200 Israelis died. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were wounded or arrested; the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem documented systematic use of live fire against stone-throwers and the use of bone-breaking as a punitive measure.
The intifada ended formally with the Oslo Accords signed on September 13, 1993, which established the Palestinian National Authority and provided a framework for Palestinian self-governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.
The First Intifada reshaped the political landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that outlasted the Oslo process. It demonstrated that the Palestinian population within the occupied territories — not only the PLO leadership in exile — was a primary political actor, and it forced both Israel and the international community to reckon with the occupation’s unsustainability.
The intifada prompted the PLO, meeting in Algiers in November 1988, to issue its Declaration of Independence and formally recognize Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 borders — a dramatic shift that opened the door to the Oslo negotiations. It also spawned Hamas, which rejected recognition of Israel and continued armed resistance after Oslo, establishing the intra-Palestinian political division that would shape the conflict through the 2000s.
For the broader Middle East, the intifada confirmed that the Palestinian question could not be resolved by occupation alone and accelerated the Madrid Conference (1991) and Oslo process. The uprising is also notable for its early use of organized civil disobedience alongside violence — a dual-track strategy that influenced later protest movements globally.