Twenty years after the Second Intifada, the wounds are fresh in the minds of Palestinians with many families still waiting for their children who sacrificed their innocence and grew up behind bars to be released from Israeli prisons.
The uprising erupted on Sept. 28, 2000, after Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon paid a high-profile visit to Jerusalem’s most fiercely disputed holy site, the walled Old City compound known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Palestinians regarded Sharon's walkabout as a calculated provocation, but Israel accused Palestine's then-leader Yasser Arafat of inciting violence, two months after a failed peace summit in the U.S. Palestinians signaled they would accept nothing less than a viable state in what is now Israeli-occupied territory with its capital in east Jerusalem.
The Palestinian uprising continued until February 2005 and claimed the lives of 4,412 Palestinians with as many as 49,000 injured and 119,000 arrested. Children were at the center of the conflict and became a symbol of the uprising, like Mohammad Dora, who was killed in front of his father with cameras capturing the last moments of his life.
During the uprising, eight children in south Jerusalem were shot and then arrested at a park by Israeli occupation forces.
Israeli forces also razed the home of Palestinian Rana Ahmed on her wedding day. She was 15 at the time and had to watch friends and relatives being killed and her home demolished in 2003, three years after intifada, as reported by the Anadolu Agency (AA).
"The worst nightmare in my life was when they demolished our house on my wedding day. The celebrations turned into the gloom. I was left searching for my white dress buried under the rubble. My makeup products were all smashed," said Ahmed, who now has three children and lives in Rafah.
Israel's land grab
During the five-year intifada, Israel built a barrier to cut off West Bank Palestinians, shifting the geographical terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and radically changing the dynamic between two intertwined peoples. Palestinians say it was a land grab that cuts miles into the occupied West Bank and was designed to annex parts of the territory that Israel captured and occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, which Palestinians seek for a future state. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ruled in an advisory opinion in 2004 that the barrier was illegal under international law. Israel rejected this, accusing the court of being “politically motivated.”
While West Bank Palestinians could before 2000 easily walk or drive into Israel, a generation later, some Israelis are now most likely to encounter Palestinians while serving as soldiers at a checkpoint, unless they are among the 450,000 Israelis now living in West Bank settlements.
Over the past decade, the population of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has increased 50%, according to official data from Israeli authorities. The international community regards all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories as illegal and a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis are now living in the territory, which is claimed by Palestinians for their future state. Netanyahu has repeatedly promised that the Jewish West Bank settlements will be "part of the state of Israel" and that none will be evacuated in any kind of agreement with Palestinians. With peace efforts stalled and little hope for an independent state anytime soon, the Palestinians who remain in the occupied territories are left to endure an uncertain future.
In February, a U.S.-Israeli team began to develop a "precise map" of parts to annex in the West Bank, and on Jan. 28, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled what Netanyahu called "the deal of the century" in an effort to end one of the longest-running disputes in the Middle East. Under the plan, Trump proposed a patchwork Palestinian state boxed in by illegal Israeli settlements, as well as recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Jerusalem as Israel's "undivided capital." His plan unilaterally annuls previous United Nations resolutions on the Palestinian issue and suggests giving Israel almost everything it has demanded.
