"Everyone here has a demonstration inside his heart"
The uprising might have started any place, but it began in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp—whose 50,000 residents now proudly refer to their home as mu'askar al-thawra ("camp of the revolution"). Gaza Strip residents fueled the uprising with demonstrations that sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands, waving flags and carrying symbolic coffins, chanting every variety of nationalist slogan and vowing to revenge the latest martyr. Youths controlled whole neighborhoods in the cities and closed off the entrances to their camps with stone barricades, garbage and burning tires. When soldiers entered, residents pelted them with stones, debris and, occasionally, petrol bombs. Local shopkeepers closed down and laborers who worked in Israel refused to go to their jobs. Israeli officials refer to the demonstrations as "riots" and defend their repression as necessary to preserve "law and order."
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