December 1987

December 1987: the intifada begins, and Hamas is founded

On 8 December 1987 an Israeli army truck killed four Palestinians at the Erez checkpoint. They were from Jabalia camp. The protests began at their funeral, and that is where the first intifada starts.

Hamas was founded in Gaza within days, out of a Muslim Brotherhood welfare network that Israel had licensed in 1979 and tolerated for years as a counterweight to the secular PLO. Its charter came the following August.

Four American papers ran a dispatch from Jabalia on 20 December, twelve days in. None of them mentions Hamas, because it was two weeks old and nobody had heard of it. Everything above the 1987 mark on this page was printed before any of it happened.