"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." To the contrary, the protests showed restraint and rationality, which stemmed from a Gaza Strip-wide sense of community and of purposeful resistance. Demonstrations were not "peaceful" but neither did they rum Palestinians into mindless mobs. Youths stripped one Israeli down to his underwear in front of Shifa Hospital, but then let him run back to his fellow soldiers. Ayoung Palestinian took another soldier's rifle away from him, broke it in two, then handed it back. The power of Palestinians came from their sheer numbers and open defiance of Israeli authority. "We were waiting to do such an uprising," said one young resident. From another: "Everyone here has a demonstration inside his heart."

Demonstrators chose targets carefully, setting a fire military vehicles and Israeli buses, attacking police stations, smashing Israeli bank windows and even storming an Israeli army outpost in the middle of Jabalya. On days of total strike, when transportation was also supposed to halt, even cars bearing Gaza's distinctive grey license plates might come under a hail of stones. Yet there were no attacks on any of a dozen Israeli resort settlements and no Israeli fatalities or even serious injuries from the several million stones that must have been tossed. On some days Gaza was so "hot" that the sky was black with the smoke of burning tires and tear gas wafted in all directions. Experienced eyes often compared the street fighting and the air of anarchy apparent in Gaza to Beirut, a vision West Bankers saw only on television news clips. The scenes of the lopsided war in the sandy Strip and, at least for one brief moment, victory over the hated occupiers, left many observers breathless and asking, "Have you been to Gaza?"

Travel was limited to crews of foreign TV networks who plastered their cars with Arabic and English "Press" signs, and to military vehicles buzzing about pretending to have some control over a population they thought they knew so well. Even veteran Palestinian taxi drivers who had driven the Jerusalem-Gaza route for twenty years refused to enter the Strip on total strike days. Gaza's Palestinians, the majority of whom have lived in refugee camps for forty years, knew there would be a terrible price to pay for their open defiance of Israeli rule. Authorities tried to confront every protest with live ammunition, then found there were too many people and too many incidents to deal with. Troops were doubled, then tripled and eventually increased to five times the usual number, including the crack Givati and Golani brigades.

In the first six weeks, the death toll was highest in Gaza: twenty-seven Palestinians representing every camp and city in this tiny area were killed, and at least 200 suffered gunshot injuries. Five boys, aged thirteen to sixteen, were among those killed. Families of two of the victims said they were killed at close range after they had been wounded. Many deaths were from head wounds, although Israeli soldiers were equipped with a new sniper gun which made killing avoidable. In the second six weeks, only two Gazans died from bullet wounds, one from month-old injuries, but fourteen died from tear gas and three boys, all age fifteen, were beaten to death by soldiers in separate incidents in February.

By mid-January tents were set up in Ansar II detention camp in Gaza City to hold 800 detainees; another 400 youths were sent north into Israel, to Atlit military prison, where conditions were equally appalling. Still more were held in police stations and military headquarters. Gaza lawyers could not speak to their clients, sometimes they could not even locate them before their court appearances. They could not bring defense witnesses or even make a line of argument in their favor. There was no possibility of refuting the testimony of soldiers. Release on bail was never granted. All Gaza lawyers declared a strike in mid-December, saying they could not defend their clients until the beatings in prison stopped and conditions improved and until some minimum standards were introduced into the trial procedures. (West Bank lawyers joined their strike two weeks later.) The Israeli kangaroo court system proceeded undetened. Trials went on without the presence of defense attorneys, resulting in high fines and sentences of four to five months for demonstrating and three to five years for throwing petrol bombs.

The focus of the Palestinian uprising remained on the Gaza Strip until mid-January 1988, when the authorities imposed long curfews on all eight Gaza Strip refugee camps. No one was allowed outside; food and water shortages added to the people's misery. Soldiers fired tear gas into homes and dropped tear gas into courtyards by helicopter. Soldiers were stationed at the entrances and patrolled inside the vast camps at night, marking their way by painting four-foot-high Hebrew letters on the walls for "school," "mosque" and the names of neighborhoods. All the while they made arrests, searched houses and beat residents, young and old, using gun butts, clubs and boots. One day in Jabalya camp, 100 people used their precious hour-long break in the curfew to seek medical treatment in the camp's United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) clinic for injuries inflicted when soldiers broke into their homes and beat them.

Reports of food and medicine shortages during the long curfews on Gaza camps brought a tremendous outpouring of emergency relief from Palestinian institutions inside Israel and the West Bank. Trucks of food, milk and clothing came from the Galilee and the Golan, and from women's groups and other charitable organizations in the West Bank. Israel's attempt to starve out an already poor and very young refugee population reminded Palestinians of blockades on Beirut and the camps in Lebanon.

According to Israeli journalist Yehuda Litani, Israelis think of Gaza as a "horror," which is why Foreign Minister Shimon Peres could suggest a staged Israeli withdrawal early in December. The "Gaza First" idea has been tossed around by Israeli officials for the last ten years, as they ponder what to do with 600,000 landless Palestinians. People in Gaza reject the notion of partitioning Gaza from the West Bank. As in the West Bank, popular committees evolved and brought a measure of local government to neighborhoods and camps—organizing strike schedules for shopkeepers, assisting with the injured and directing demonstrations. Developments in Gaza, such as the lawyers' strike, became models for the more sophisticated West Bank. Gaza health and professional associations sent a petition reminding the International Committee of the Red Cross of its duty to be "more outspoken" against the "unbridled savagery" Gaza's population was witnessing.

In December underground leaflets from both the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called for continued mass action. Then the major PLO factions together with the Islamic Jihad issued what became an extremely successful series of leaflets giving a semblance of leadership to the uprising. The older Islamic fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brothers, periodically issued their own statements—for example, calling for strike action to commemorate Gaza's first occupation by Israel in 1956. But the Brothers lost favor with Gazans during the uprising.

Palestinians in Gaza hear the latest weekly communiques of the Unified Leadership broadcast by outside radio stations—Monte Carlo and al-Quds (until it was jammed by Israel)—making actual distribution of the leaflets unnecessary. Gaza residents often observed spontaneous general strikes for days at a time in response to local incidents. Huge demonstrations of 10,000 throughout Gaza greeted the news of a raid by three Palestinian commandos near Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor. And thousands of Gazan women with young children jammed Palestine Square in the center of Gaza City celebrating International Women's Day for the first time.

A surreptitious "National Information Committee" published daily press releases in English providing details of neighborhood incidents and political commentary and delivered them to Gaza's only hotel, which served as the headquarters for foreign correspondents. Israel closed down the main press office in Gaza for one year and a second office for one month. Three Gaza journalists were arrested and their press equipment confiscated, a human rights worker was summoned for interrogation and another, 'Adli al-Yazuri, whose younger brother Basil was murdered by soldiers in December, was sentenced to six months detention without trial. The telephones of lawyers and physicians, the main source of information for people outside of Gaza, were also mysteriously cut for weeks at a time. And two leading lawyers were imprisoned. By early March, it seemed as if the barbed wire around the notorious Ansar II prison camp had been extended to encompass all of the Gaza Strip in one giant prison. Despite the repressive measures dished out by the Israeli military authorities, though, the Gaza Strip today is filled with a sense of hope, confidence and visible unity.