From the Stone Uprising of 1987 to the Great March of Return of 2018 the slingshot has been a tool for the Palestinian struggle that unleashed a wave of anger against the Israeli occupation.
During the Great March of Return young men and women competed in using the slingshot to throw stones at the Israeli occupation forces (IOF).
The use of the slingshot was particularly prominent during the First Palestinian Uprising which broke out in 1987 and lasted for several years against IOF soldiers wherever clashes broke out in the streets and alleys of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The slingshot is made of a rope and is held from the two ends and then from the middle in a certain way that allows putting a stone in the middle node where its holder grabs it from both ends and starts waving it circularly over the head leasing one of the two ends and tossing the stone towards a specific target.
In fact the slingshot became one of the most prominent tools of the popular resistance against the Israeli occupation during the intifada.
The presence of the slingshot decreased during Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000) when the clashes with the IOF escalated into an armed confrontation and it disappeared completely in the Gaza Strip with the withdrawal of the occupation forces in 2005.
The slingshot and other tools of popular struggle returned to the confrontations in the occupied West Bank where young people competed to prepare it in various forms and arrangements and returned to prominence in the Gaza Strip with the eruption of anger demonstrations against the recognition of US President Donald Trump of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017 and more broadly since the start of the Great March of Return in Gaza on March 30.
Slingshots could be used to target the IOF soldiers using relatively bigger stones from a distance. This suits demonstrations in the Gaza Strip where citizens gather near the Gaza border fence and the Israeli-imposed buffer zone extending on hundreds of meters of Palestinian land.
