The First Intifada history is often reduced to a single image: a child hurling a stone at an armored vehicle. That image, while real, obscures what was in practice a sophisticated, largely unarmed civil uprising — built on neighborhood committees, tax strikes, commercial boycotts, and clandestine schools — that fundamentally altered the international politics of Palestine between 1987 and 1993. Understanding the full architecture of that rebellion is essential to understanding how Palestinian society organized under occupation, how Israel responded, and why the world could no longer ignore the question of Palestinian self-determination.
Origins: The Jabalia Camp Incident, December 1987
The First Intifada did not begin with a political directive. It ignited from grief.
On 1987-12-08, an Israeli Defense Forces truck collided with a car carrying Palestinian workers near the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing four Palestinians and injuring seven. In a territory already saturated with checkpoints, land confiscations, administrative detentions, and collective punishments, the crash was immediately — and widely — read as deliberate. It followed the killing of an Israeli businessman in Gaza just days earlier, and rumor spread that the truck collision was an act of revenge.
By the following day, 1987-12-09, mass protests had erupted across Jabalia camp. Israeli forces opened fire. Hatem Abu Sisi, a seventeen-year-old, became the first person killed in what would become a six-year uprising. Within days, the protests had spread to Gaza City, Khan Younis, Rafah, and across the West Bank — from Nablus to Ramallah to Hebron. No single organization had issued a call. The uprising was, from its first hours, decentralized.
The Structural Conditions That Made Rebellion Inevitable
The spark was Jabalia, but the fuel had been accumulating for twenty years. By December 1987, Israel had occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip for two decades following the 1967 war. That occupation had produced:
- Confiscation of approximately 52% of West Bank land for Israeli settlements and military zones by the mid-1980s, according to documentation compiled by B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
- Systematic deindustrialization of the Palestinian economy, with Gaza and the West Bank structured as captive labor markets for the Israeli economy.
- Over 600,000 Palestinians living in refugee camps across Gaza — Jabalia alone housing roughly 60,000 people in 1987 in conditions of severe overcrowding.
- Routine administrative detention without charge or trial under Military Order 1229 and its predecessors, affecting tens of thousands of Palestinians through the 1970s and 1980s.
- Prohibition on independent Palestinian political parties, trade unions, and public assemblies.
The generation that rose in December 1987 had grown up entirely under military occupation. They had no memory of life before it.
The UNLU: A Decentralized Architecture of Resistance
Within weeks of the Jabalia explosion, an organizing body emerged: the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), known in Arabic as Al-Qiyada Al-Wataniya Al-Muwahhada lil-Intifada. The UNLU was a clandestine coalition drawing together the four main factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization operating inside the occupied territories — Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Palestinian Communist Party.
The UNLU operated through a rotating, anonymous leadership structure specifically designed to survive Israeli arrest operations. No single individual led it. When one cell was detained, others continued. The UNLU communicated with the Palestinian public through numbered communiqués — bayanat — distributed as printed leaflets throughout the West Bank and Gaza. These leaflets set the weekly and monthly rhythms of the uprising: which days would see commercial strikes, which Israeli products to boycott, when workers should refuse to cross into Israel.
What the UNLU Actually Built
What distinguishes the First Intifada from a spontaneous riot is precisely this organizational layer beneath the street confrontations. The UNLU's communiqués coordinated an array of civil resistance mechanisms:
- Commercial strikes: Palestinian shopkeepers across the West Bank and Gaza observed half-day strikes on schedules issued by the UNLU, lasting for extended periods through 1988–1991. Israeli military authorities responded by forcibly welding shops open — an act that became its own form of political theater.
- Tax revolts: The village of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, became internationally known for refusing to pay Israeli occupation taxes in 1989, declaring "no taxation without representation." Israeli authorities confiscated residents' furniture, appliances, and business equipment in response.
- Boycotts of Israeli products: Palestinian consumers were directed to substitute local production for Israeli-manufactured goods, stimulating a localized economy of Palestinian-made food, clothing, and medicine.
- Refusal to work in Israel: On designated strike days, Palestinian laborers stayed home, disrupting Israeli agricultural and construction sectors dependent on cheap Palestinian labor.
- Resignation of Palestinian police: Hundreds of Palestinians employed by the Israeli Civil Administration in the occupied territories resigned their posts in coordinated acts of non-cooperation.
Popular Committees and Alternative Governance
The most structurally significant innovation of the First Intifada was the emergence of popular committees — lijan sha'biya — at the neighborhood, village, and camp level. These committees took on functions the UNLU could coordinate only in broad terms: distributing food and medicine to families under curfew, organizing garbage collection when municipalities were shut down, running first aid networks, and adjudicating local disputes outside the Israeli military court system.
When Israeli authorities imposed prolonged curfews — sometimes lasting weeks in specific towns — the popular committees ran supply chains under cover of darkness. The committees became, in effect, an embryonic Palestinian civil administration.
Israel declared the popular committees illegal under Military Order 1139 in 1988, making membership punishable by up to ten years' imprisonment. The prohibition was widely disregarded.
Alternative Education
Israel's closure of Palestinian schools and universities was one of the occupation's principal tools of control and punishment. Birzeit University was closed by Israeli military order for cumulative periods totaling years throughout the 1980s. With the Intifada, Israel closed schools across the West Bank from 1988 onward, citing security conditions.
The Palestinian response was clandestine education. Teachers organized underground classes in homes, mosques, and churches. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which runs schools in Gaza and the West Bank, documented the systematic obstruction of Palestinian education during this period. The underground school networks of the First Intifada were among the most documented forms of nonviolent resistance of the era, covered extensively by human rights organizations including Al-Haq, the Ramallah-based affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists.
Israel's Response: The Iron Fist and the 'Break Their Bones' Directive
The Israeli government's response to the uprising was codified in a policy of deliberate physical violence that went beyond standard crowd-control doctrine. In January 1988, then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin articulated what became known as the "Iron Fist" policy. Rabin's directive to Israeli forces — reported at the time by Israeli newspapers including Hadashot and later confirmed by multiple Israeli journalists and researchers — instructed soldiers to suppress the uprising through "force, might, and beatings."
The phrase most associated with Rabin in this period — that soldiers should "break the bones" of Palestinian demonstrators — circulated widely in Israeli and international media. Israeli journalist Zeev Schiff and historian Ehud Ya'ari documented the policy extensively in their 1989 book Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising — Israel's Third Front, drawing on Israeli military and government sources. The policy reflected a calculation that lethal shooting was generating too much international condemnation, while systematic beatings — fracturing arms, legs, and ribs — would be less visible and less politically costly.
It was not. Images and testimonies of Israeli soldiers beating Palestinians with clubs, and of detainees being buried alive in one documented incident in the Nablus area reported by CBS News in February 1988, produced international revulsion.
Casualty Figures: What B'Tselem Documented
The human cost of the First Intifada on the Palestinian side has been systematically documented by B'Tselem. According to B'Tselem's databases covering the period 1987-12-09 through 1993-09-13 (the date of the Oslo Accords signing):
- 1,070+ Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces during the First Intifada.
- 237 of those killed were children under the age of 17.
- Thousands more were injured, with B'Tselem and medical organizations documenting tens of thousands of injuries from live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas, and beatings.
- Approximately 120,000 Palestinians were detained by Israeli authorities during the Intifada period, according to figures compiled by human rights organizations including Al-Haq.
On the Israeli side, B'Tselem documents 100 Israeli civilians and security personnel killed by Palestinians during the same period.
The disparity in casualties was remarked upon by the United Nations Human Rights Commission in successive resolutions during the Intifada years, and by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in contemporaneous reporting.
Collective Punishment
Beyond direct violence, Israeli authorities implemented systematic collective punishment measures that B'Tselem and Al-Haq documented at length:
- Prolonged curfews: Entire towns, including Nablus, Ramallah, and Gaza City, were placed under total curfew for extended periods — sometimes 40 or more consecutive days.
- House demolitions: Homes of individuals accused of participation in the Intifada were demolished. OCHA oPt's predecessor bodies documented this practice as violating Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
- Deportations: Dozens of Palestinian political activists and community leaders were deported to Lebanon under military orders.
- Agricultural destruction: Olive groves and agricultural land were uprooted as punitive measures in several villages, documented by Al-Haq field workers.
Hamas and the Internal Politics of the Uprising
The First Intifada also marked the effective public emergence of Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya — the Islamic Resistance Movement), which issued its founding charter in 1988-08. Hamas had roots in the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and operated initially in parallel to, and sometimes in competition with, the UNLU.
Hamas issued its own communiqués and organized its own strike days, which sometimes conflicted with UNLU directives. The two leaderships were distinct and often tense. This internal plurality — the UNLU's secular-nationalist coalition alongside Hamas's Islamist movement — shaped Palestinian politics for decades afterward, and is essential context for understanding the post-Oslo split between Fatah and Hamas.
From Intifada to Madrid and Oslo
By 1991, the Intifada had changed the international political calculus around Palestine in ways two decades of PLO diplomacy alone had not achieved. Several factors converged:
- The sustained nature and civil character of the uprising made Palestinian claims to statehood undeniable in international forums.
- The Intifada demonstrated that the Palestinian population inside the occupied territories — not only the PLO leadership in exile in Tunis — was a political actor that any settlement would have to address.
- American and European pressure on Israel increased, as the cost of sustaining the occupation — economically, diplomatically, and in terms of Israeli civil society — became visible.
The Madrid Conference of October 1991 brought Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to the table for the first time under international sponsorship, a direct product of the political pressure the Intifada had generated. The Palestinian delegation to Madrid was drawn from the occupied territories, reflecting the Intifada leadership's centrality.
The Oslo Accords, signed on 1993-09-13, emerged from secret negotiations in Norway between the PLO and Israel. They created the Palestinian Authority and established a framework for phased Israeli withdrawal and eventual statehood negotiations. The Oslo process was inseparable from the Intifada: it was the uprising that compelled negotiation.
Whether Oslo ultimately served Palestinian rights is a separate and heavily debated question — one that subsequent events, including the expansion of Israeli settlements throughout the Oslo years, have rendered deeply contested. Human Rights Watch documented continued settlement expansion as a central factor in the failure of Oslo's framework.
Legacy and Lessons
The First Intifada's legacy operates on several levels simultaneously:
- Organizationally, it demonstrated the capacity of Palestinian civil society to self-organize under extreme repression — a precedent that informed later grassroots movements including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign launched in 2005.
- Legally, it generated a body of documentation — by B'Tselem, Al-Haq, UNRWA, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch — that established systematic patterns of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law under occupation.
- Politically, it inserted the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza as an independent political subject, separate from the PLO in exile, into international negotiations.
- Iconographically, the stone — al-hajr — became the symbol of the uprising, and the shabab (youth) throwing stones at tanks became one of the defining images of late twentieth-century political resistance globally.
But the stone should not obscure the ledger. The First Intifada's power lay not primarily in projectiles but in the collective withdrawal of Palestinian compliance — from taxes, from labor, from Israeli-administered institutions — and in the construction of parallel Palestinian structures. It was a civil uprising conducted against an armed military occupation, at a cost of over 1,070 Palestinian lives documented by B'Tselem, 237 of them children.
FAQ
Q: What started the First Intifada?
The immediate trigger was a traffic incident on 1987-12-08 near Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, when an Israeli army truck killed four Palestinian workers. Protests erupted the following day and spread across Gaza and the West Bank within days. The underlying causes were twenty years of Israeli military occupation, land confiscation, economic deprivation, and systematic denial of Palestinian political rights.
Q: Was the First Intifada primarily violent or nonviolent?
The First Intifada was primarily a civil resistance movement, organized around commercial strikes, tax boycotts, refusal of Palestinian employees to serve in Israeli-administered institutions, underground education networks, and neighborhood-level popular committees. Stone-throwing — the act most frequently depicted in international media — occurred alongside these structures but was not the central organizing mechanism. The UNLU's communiqués consistently emphasized civil disobedience tactics. B'Tselem's casualty data, showing over 1,070 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces against 100 Israelis killed by Palestinians, reflects the fundamental asymmetry in armed capacity.
Q: Who led the First Intifada?
The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) provided the primary coordination framework. It was a clandestine coalition of four PLO-affiliated factions: Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, and the Palestinian Communist Party. The UNLU operated without a single identifiable leader by design, rotating leadership to prevent Israeli arrest operations from decapitating the organization. Hamas operated a parallel structure but was not part of the UNLU.
Q: What was Rabin's 'break their bones' policy?
In January 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin directed Israeli forces to suppress the uprising through physical beatings rather than primarily lethal force — a policy documented by Israeli journalists Zeev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari in Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising — Israel's Third Front (1989) and covered contemporaneously by Israeli newspapers including Hadashot. The directive reflected a calculation that beatings would be less internationally visible than shootings. B'Tselem and international human rights organizations documented extensive use of clubs and physical force against Palestinian civilians and detainees throughout 1988 and after.
Q: How many Palestinians were killed in the First Intifada?
B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, documented 1,070+ Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces between 1987-12-09 and 1993-09-13. Of those, 237 were children under seventeen years of age. B'Tselem's full statistical database is publicly available at btselem.org/statistics.
Q: How did the First Intifada lead to the Oslo Accords?
The six-year uprising demonstrated to the international community and to Israel that the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza was a sustained political actor, not merely a passive subject of occupation. It increased international diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel and forced the PLO — which had played little direct role in organizing the uprising — to assert its relevance by engaging in negotiations. The Madrid Conference of 1991-10 was the first direct result; the Oslo Accords of 1993-09-13 were the second, creating the Palestinian Authority and a framework for phased negotiations toward statehood, though that framework has not resulted in Palestinian statehood as of 2025.
