A Third Intifada May Be Closer Than You Think

Alexa Fishman

Introduction

The past two years have been volatile ones in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The war between Israel and Hamas that ended a little more than two years after the October 7 attacks was characterized by global accusations against Israel of genocide, the fight for the return of the hostages, and rising Palestinian death tolls. While this war and its ceasefire are at the forefront of the international community’s mind, a different, lesser-known threat may be brewing: an uprising, or in Arabic, an intifada. Two Palestinian intifadas have already occurred in the past 30 years, and with the current unstable state of the region, some are musing that a third may be on the horizon. Israel and the Palestinian Territories’ current conditions, as later described, show many similarities to the events and phenomena that led up to the first and second intifadas, implicating a potentially dangerous future. 

Background

While they worked towards similar goals, the first and second intifadas were distinctly different. Triggered by the rumor that an Israeli truck accident in Gaza that killed four Palestinians wasn’t an accident, the first intifada began in 1987 with Palestinian kids throwing stones at Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. This action blossomed into a wave of demonstrations that protested against Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as well as advocated for the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. This first uprising was grassroots based, relying on civil society leadership rather than that of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—the international representation for Palestinians—which was then in exile in Lebanon.

Local leadership decided the intifada would be civil disobedience-based. Therefore, the first intifada was characterized by nonviolent actions such as boycotting of Israeli products, creating an underground radio station, and ignoring Israeli military and government instructions on curfews and public demonstrations. However, not all Palestinian action was nonviolent. Multiple Islamist extremist groups who preferred violence rose in power at this time, most notably Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Violence and antisemitism are embedded in these groups and are integral to their mission—Hamas’ original charter calls for jihad, the cleansing of the Jewish people, and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land that is now Israel. Instead of working with the PLO-backed coalition in the West Bank, they frequently resorted to measures such as street violence, murder, stabbing, and kidnapping. The majority of action in the First Intifada ended in 1991, although some mark the Oslo Accords as the Intifada’s formal end.

The Second Intifada began on September 28, 2000, when Palestinian protestors and Israeli police clashed in Jerusalem after the leader of the Israeli opposition party, Ariel Sharon, visited the Temple Mount with a large security detail. While also working towards a Palestinian sovereign state and the end of Israeli occupation, the Second Intifada was less a popular resistance campaign and more a series of violent attacks led by the PLO and Hamas. Suicide bombings were the most common Palestinian method;there were 56 suicide bombings from September 2000 to December 2005, with targets ranging from shopping malls and restaurants to buses, schools, and synagogues. Other Palestinian attacks included shootings, grenade and rocket attacks, stabbings, and a bus ramming.

Israel responded to this violence with military operations aimed at crippling Palestinian infrastructure and assassinating and detaining Palestinian leadership. As a result of intensifying Palestinians attacks, Israel also exerted more control over Palestinian life. Israel began construction of the separation barrier around the West Bank in 2002, which, while officially intended to protect Israelis, became yet another point of Palestinian resentment. The end of the Second Intifada is typically marked as the unilateral Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, though the uprising had already been losing momentum in the months following Yasser Arafat’s death in November 2004.

Past Reflecting the Present

Many events and conditions today are eerily similar to those that led up to and caused both intifadas. These fall into four general categories: war, terror attacks, Israeli control over Palestinian life, and socio-political polarization.

War 

By the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, the Palestinians and the Arab world at large had already experienced numerous humiliating losses in wars with Israel. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured from Jordan and Egypt respectively. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War didn’t change this status, but it did further cement the public belief that Israel could repel Arab forces, which therefore projected a picture of Israeli strength and Arab weakness. This perception was only reinforced by the First Lebanon War (1982-1985), which ousted the PLO from Lebanon—their base of operations after Jordan expelled the group—shifting their focus to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

Just as Israel decisively defeated multiple Arab state armies before the First Intifada, it has now achieved similar military victories against Hamas and Hezbollah, a Shia militant group based in southern Lebanon. After October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants from Gaza stormed Israeli towns and the nearby Nova Festival, killing, raping, and taking hostage civilians and soldiers, Israel began bombarding and eventually invading the Gaza Strip. The day after the October 7 attack, Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in support of Gazans, and Israel responded accordingly. The war between the two led to thousands of Lebanese deaths, widespread displacement of residents of southern Lebanon—where Hezbollah principally operates—and 127 Israeli deaths. Israel leveraged the war as an opportunity to cripple Hezbollah, demonstrating its operational reach and intelligence capabilities most decisively in September 2024 with the assassination of leader Hassan Nasrallah and the pager and walkie-talkie detonation the same month. A ceasefire signed in November 2024 between Hezbollah and Israel is currently still in effect; however, Israel has launched over 669 airstrikes towards specific targets in Lebanon in the 14 months since. Fighting between the IDF and Hamas lasted until a ceasefire agreement to end the war came into effect on October 10, 2025, but at that point, the majority of Hamas’ ability to fight back had been destroyed.

War was a principal motivator behind the start of the first intifada; the Arab defeats generated a sense of resentment against Israel throughout the Middle East, while Palestinians found themselves not only at the mercy of Israeli control but also abandoned by an Arab world that had lost interest in their plight. In the present day, war has produced similar effects: Gazans resent and even hate Israel for the conditions they now endure, such as reported wartime famine and widespread infrastructure damage. Furthermore, Hezbollah’s reputation as a force that could resist Israel has been shattered, diminishing Palestinian morale and their belief that Hezbollah could intervene on their behalf. 

Terror Attacks 

During the First Lebanon War, Palestinians realized that IDF forces were tied up in Lebanon and therefore vulnerable. They exploited this opportunity, escalating terrorist attacks, guerilla warfare, and mass civil violence during the war in ways that prepared them for later conflict with Israel. In the years before the second intifada, as the Palestinian Authority (PA)—the governing body of the Palestinians created in the Oslo Accords—and Israel engaged in negotiations, young Palestinian leadership concluded that the use of force would strengthen their bargaining position in negotiations with Israel, an idea reinforced by their success in using violent riots in May 2000 to compel an Israeli withdrawal from a portion of Hebron. 

The situation today is similar. Israelis have experienced continued terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank for decades, most commonly stabbings, shootings, vehicle rammings, and bombings. In the past two years, however, the number of terrorist attacks against Israelis in both regions has significantly increased—3,436 attacks were carried out in 2023 (not including the October 7 attack) and 6,828 in 2024. Therefore, as increases in violence precipitated both intifadas, the similar increase occurring today is a cause for concern in terms of the advent of another intifada.

Israeli Control 

In the lead-up to the first intifada, settler incidents in the West Bank increased, in which Jewish settlers attacked Palestinians but received only lenient punishments, if any, for their actions. At the time, Israel had full control over the West Bank, until the Oslo Accords. The two phases of the Accords, Oslo I and II, were signed in September 1993 and September 1995, respectively, providing for PA control of certain areas—in terms of security and civil governance—of the West Bank. However, Israel continued building settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a practice not explicitly forbidden by the Accords, confiscating Palestinian land and homes as they did. Furthermore, the borders around the territories and within the West Bank were practically all controlled by Israel, preventing Palestinians from traveling between Gaza and the West Bank and disrupting Palestinian trade, travel, medical, and other activity during frequent border closures. 

Israeli control of the West Bank has only increased since the intifadas. Settlement expansion continues, as have settler attacks on Palestinians; October 2025 saw record-breaking counts of settler attacks, coming after such violence increased 30% over 2024 in the first few months of 2025. In that month alone, Palestinian communities were victims of 264 instances of attacks including torched cars, desecrated mosques, destroyed croplands, and violent assaults, which only occasionally were condemned by the Israeli government. Apart from settlements, Israel has expanded its scope of administrative detentions in the West Bank and has suspended over 150,000 permits for Palestinians from the West Bank to work in Israel. 

After Oslo was signed, Palestinians believed the end of Israeli occupation and the beginning of self-determination were on the horizon. However, these changes didn’t materialize in the years post-Oslo, and instead many Palestinians felt only a tightening Israeli grip, especially in the West Bank. The lack of improvement for Palestinians led them to believe the peace process was a failure and generally deceptive, providing motivation to rise up. Today, the aforementioned expanded Israeli control has similarly contributed to mounting Palestinian frustration, but the devastation in Gaza—and recognition that Israel could inflict the same upon them—has led many Palestinians in the West Bank to resist the urge to rebel. 

Polarization

In Israel, political and ideological polarization and radicalization increased among Jews and Israeli Arabs in the lead-up to the first intifada. The split between the left and right wings, largely defined by one’s stance on security issues in dealing with the Palestinian Territories, widened and Jewish hostility towards Arabs grew due to casualties in Lebanon. In the Palestinian Terrorities, issues like a lack of civil rights improvement and a slow pace of socio-economic change began to anger Palestinians, especially radicalizing citizens of the Gaza Strip due to their worse conditions. There was a lack of privacy due to high population density, and more than 50% of the population lived in refugee camps. Furthermore, before the second intifada, the constituencies of both Yasser Arafat (the president of the PA) and Ehud Barak (the prime minister of Israel) saw their leaders as ineffective and corrupt, and some Israeli leadership was acting with political gain, rather than regional peace, in mind, which further polarized the Israeli and Palestinian populations.

In the present Israeli and Palestinian societies, radicalization and polarization are also growing, specifically in response to a lack of trust in governmental leadership. Distrust in leaders and the perception that the government is corrupt are widespread in both Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been embroiled in three separate court cases since 2019, when he was indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Despite being the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history, Netanyahu is extremely polarizing, which has deeply divided Israeli society. As of September 2025, his approval rating was only 40%; however, this figure has likely gone up in the months following the Gaza ceasefire agreement and release of the hostages held by Hamas. In the West Bank, confidence in leadership is practically nonexistent. President Mahmoud Abbas of the PA has been in power since 2005, which was the last time the PA held presidential elections. Palestinian organization People’s Company for Polls and Survey Research (PCPSR) conducted a poll in October 2025 which found that 80% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza want Abbas to resign, with PCPSR pollster Khalil Shikaki commenting that Abbas’ “legitimacy was depleted a long time ago…he has become a liability to his own party, and for the Palestinians as a whole.” Without a leader to depend on, Palestinians have turned away from the PA and radicalized; PCPSR predicts that if elections were held in the West Bank as of late October 2025, Hamas would take power over Abbas’ currently ruling party Fatah. 

Conclusion 

The parallels between the lead-up to the first and second intifadas and contemporary conditions are numerous. However, critics argue these similarities are simply eternal factors of Israeli and Palestinian life rather than indicators of uprising. Some also reason that because of the present lack of coordination between Palestinians within the West Bank and between the Territories, coupled with increased Israeli military capabilities, a third intifada isn’t on the horizon. However, with so many similarities—many more than differences—between the lead-up to the first and second intifadas and events in the region now, the issue is difficult to ignore. History demonstrates that uprisings emerge not from ideal conditions but from accumulated grievances reaching a breaking point. Palestinians are acutely aware of this history, and can study past successes and failures while recognizing the present alignment of motivating factors: war-induced resentment, perceived abandonment by Arab allies, and expanding Israeli control. Meanwhile, tensions compound with each clash, creating an increasingly volatile environment that a single catalytic event could ignite. The question is now not whether the conditions for a third intifada exist, but if and when that spark will occur.