The earliest I found the phrase from from a Palestinian terrorist in 1993 quoted in the Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1993, page 1:
Rayad abu Kamar couldn't take his hands off his AK-47 assault rifle. The young Palestinian fighter cocked it and uncocked it. He popped the ammunition clip in and out a dozen or more times. He stroked the barrel as he explained why he chose war in this bitter, desperate land where there are no signs of a promised peace."When I got out of jail, my first thought was, 'Hey, I'm free,'" said Kamar, 21, a fugitive rebel with the Fatah Hawks of Gaza, a group linked to the Palestine Liberation Organization and its chairman, Yasser Arafat."The feeling didn't last an hour," Kamar said. "When I got home, suddenly I felt no different than before. I felt as if I had traded my small jail cell for a bigger one. That is Gaza. An open-air prison for nearly 1 million of us Palestinians. So, I decided to fight. And this is the only way I know."
Yes, even in 1993 there were sympathetic articles in mainstream media about Palestinian terrorists.
The phrase didn't stick though, until 2000. That's when one person popularized it: The Guardian's Israel correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg.
Years before Israel withdrew from Gaza, in three weeks she used the phrase three times.
October 7, 2000:
October 18:
And then, the headline on October 24, Page 1:
That seems to be the spark. After that,. the "open air prison" terminology started spreading throughout media - not only for Gaza but initially for the West Bank as well.
Reporters love to imitate.
On December 17, 2001, AP reporter Jamie Tabaray used the phrase in a widely-published story about how awful the early days of the Second Intifada was for Palestinians, who cheered the murder of Israelis.
An Independent writer followed a week later, being perhaps the first to call Gaza "the largest open-air prison in the world" in the media.
The San Francisco Chronicle followed soon after with a photo essay by a "peace activist" quoting a Gaza woman using that phrase.
Academic papers ran with it. Even though the term is pejorative and was never accurate, use of the term went from 70 times in academia in the 2000s to 503 i the 2010s and - so far - 950 times in the 2020s, according to Google Scholar.
The "prison" terminology is just another way to slander Israel. Remember, at the time the Palestinians had rejected a peace plan that would give them a state and chose a campaign of suicide bombings against Jews instead. Israel had no choice but to respond, and that meant limiting access to Israel. If anyone was in prison it was the Israelis, walling themselves off from their murderous neighbors. Israel was not imprisoning Palestinians - it was protecting its citizens from terrorism.
But the phrase was already primed to be used when Israel withdrew from Gaza. It may have been used by Palestinians themselves first, but the Western media simply couldn't resist painting the beleaguered Israelis are the prison wardens.
Which is the same kind of inversion we see with Israel all the time.
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