What happened
Whether Sharon's visit was the true trigger or merely the spark for tensions already building after Camp David's collapse two months earlier is debated by historians on both sides — Palestinian officials had reportedly warned Barak's government in advance that the visit would be seen as provocative given Sharon's history and the Israeli security escort involved, and some later accounts describe elements of the uprising as having been prepared for in advance by Palestinian factions regardless of the specific trigger. What is well documented, independent of that debate, is the security response once protests began.
B'Tselem's data from the uprising's first weeks found Israeli forces firing live ammunition, and in some documented cases rubber-coated steel bullets at close range, against protesters throwing stones — a response Israeli commanders defended as necessary given the scale of the demonstrations, but which produced casualty ratios rights groups found difficult to justify as proportionate self-defence against the threat posed by unarmed or lightly-armed protesters. The uprising escalated over the following months into suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah-linked factions against Israeli civilians (documented in detail in PalestineTimelineSeeder) and a sustained Israeli military campaign in the West Bank and Gaza that would culminate in Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 — the deadliest sustained period of the conflict prior to the 2023-2025 Gaza war.