General Information

General Information

For decades, the Palestinian terrorist organizations have waged a vicious war against the State of Israel, starting in the 1920s and 1930s, causing untold bloodshed. Their mass-casualty suicide bombing attacks claimed hundreds of victims. After the Six Day War, Palestinian terrorism accelerated and the number of terrorist attacks in Israel and abroad against Jewish and Israeli targets increased.

During the 1970s, planes were hijacked by terrorists from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.  After the Black September events (the removal of terrorists from Jordan in 1970), most prominent were terrorist attacks abroad carried out by a terrorist group from the Fatah organization calling itself Black September. Those attacks culminated in 1972, when 11 Israeli sportsmen were murdered at the Munich Olympics. Trans-border terrorist attacks were also carried out (attacks from Jordan until 1970 and attacks from the Lebanese border in the 1970s), some of them targeting Israeli civilians. In the 1990s, suicide bombing attacks became the main form of struggle carried out by the Palestinians, first by the radical Islamic organizations, primarily Hamas, and later also by secular organizations such as Fatah. 

There was a significant increase in terrorist attacks during the Palestinian terrorist campaign of 2000-2005 (known as the Al-Aqsa or Second Intifada), during which a great many attacks were carried out, including many suicide bombing attacks which disrupted daily life in Israel and threatened its large cities. The second half of 2015 and early 2016 witnessed a wave of terror characterized by lone-wolf attacks, mainly stabbing, vehicular and shooting attacks.