What happened?
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack on Israel. This was the same day as Simchat Torah, a celebratory Jewish holiday that often involves dancing, festivals, and community gatherings. This initial attack killed more than 700 people and a number were captured. Khaled Qadomi, a Hamas spokesperson, said this assault and the ensuing war is because they “want the international community to stop atrocities in Gaza against Palestinian people.” In response to the attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a counteroffensive in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli counterattack killed more than 400 people. In addition, Israel has imposed a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, intensifying its 16-year blockade of Gaza, cutting electricity and blocking the delivery of aid. In his first announcements, Netanyahu said, “Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens.” Since then, he has announced Israel’s two aims of the war: “to eliminate Hamas by destroying its military and governance capabilities, and to do everything possible to get our hostages back.”
This fighting is different from the previous assaults that have occurred in the 21st century, with casualties that have exceeded the sum of all past conflicts between Israel and Palestine since 2008. “This is not a [hit-and-run] operation; we started an all-out battle. We expect fighting to continue and the fighting front to expand. We have one prime target: our freedom and the freedom of our holy sites,” said the Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri.
The conflict is ongoing. According to AP News, as of Oct. 29 at 3:00 PM, 1,400 Israelis and 8,121 Palestinians have died and 5,431 Israeli and 22,242 Palestinians have been injured. This is part of a long string of violent conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Headlines: Hostages & Settlers & Terrorism
Many articles can be found from top news sources in the United States and the world that report on the captured Israelis, calling them “hostages” of Hamas. Hamas differentiates between Israeli civilians that live in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank and those that live in other areas of Israel; Hamas believes those living in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank are “settlers” living on Palestinian land. Hamas does not consider the people it has taken to be “hostages” because it has “declared settlers [to be] part of the occupation and part of the armed Israeli force,” according to senior spokesperson for Hamas Osama Hamdan. Qadomi said, “[T]hey are not hostages. They are prisoners of war.” This rhetoric is typically reserved for soldiers or those actively engaged in the military, but Hamas claims that violence has often been enacted against Palestinians by Israeli civilians. These attacks have been on the rise since the start of this war, most notably in the West Bank where neighborhoods are hoping to set up watch groups to help alert and protect each other. In many articles, these attacks are called “settler attacks.” The Israeli military claims that 229 people have been taken hostage by Hamas since the start of the war. Four of these people have been released. Hamas claims that almost 50 of these people have been killed by Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip.
Hamas has been designated as a “terrorist organization” by the United States and the European Union. There is no standardized definition of terrorism, but the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights defines terrorist acts as those that involve “the intimidation or coercion of populations or government through the threat or perpetration of violence, causing death, serious injury, or the taking of hostages.” The United Nations also notes that the lack of one universally-agreed definition of terrorism has led some states to develop policies and practices that discriminate against particular groups that do not have a governmental authority from which to speak or act, since the definition of terrorism permits a higher level of violence than would typically be acceptable.
Relevant Recent History
In 2005, Israel agreed to disengage from the Gaza Strip and pulled as many as 8,000 Jewish Israelis from the area. Since then, Israel has claimed it is no longer occupying the Gaza Strip. The international community and political authorities in the Gaza Strip have contested this claim, stating that the occupation has continued since Israel retained physical control over the area.
In that same year, Israel (along with Egypt) imposed a temporary land, sea, and air blockade on the Gaza Strip. After Hamas came to power in 2007, they decided to impose an indefinite blockade. Israel has maintained control over Gaza’s airspace, territorial waters, and two of its three border crossing points (the third is controlled by Egypt). Movement in and out of the Gaza Strip has been heavily restricted since Israel’s construction of an electronic and concrete fence around the Gaza Strip in 1995. In 2020, Michael Lynk, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, reported that Israel’s blockade contradicts Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits collective punishment that prevents the realization of a broad range of human rights. The blockade has led to shortages of food and fuel as well as limited access to education, healthcare, and clean water within the Gaza Strip.
There have been several other violent conflicts between Israel and Palestine since 2007. In 2008, rockets were fired in southern Israel and the Israeli government responded with a 22-day military offensive in the Gaza Strip called “Operation Cast Lead.” In 2012, Israel killed the Hamas military chief of staff and continued to carry out eight days of air assaults in “Operation Pillar of Defense.” In 2014, Hamas kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers, which led to a seven-week war. In 2021, hundreds of Palestinians were injured by Israeli security forces at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Israel claimed rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip and then responded with an air assault that lasted for 11 days. In 2022, Israel carried out air attacks and Palestinians responded by firing rockets into Israel. In May of 2023, Israel began “Operation Shield and Arrow,” which consisted of air strikes on the Gaza Strip that lasted for five days. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, from 2008-August 2023, there have been 6,407 Palestinian and 308 Israeli deaths in conflicts between the two entities.
What is Hamas?
Hamas, officially the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas being the acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya), is the political group in charge of the Gaza Strip. Hamas was founded in 1987 and was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Hamas has led the Gaza Strip since the group was elected in 2007. The main goals of Hamas are to liberate historic Palestine (according to the 1967 borders) and to confront what it calls “the Zionist project” (which refers to the goal of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which is Israel today).
What is Palestine?
Hamas recognizes Palestine as the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, which are territories over which Israel has claimed control. In 1917, the United Kingdom incorporated the Balfour Declaration, which called for the establishment of a national homeland for Jewish people in Palestine (this can also be understood as Zionism). In 1922, Palestine was a former territory of the Ottoman Empire that was placed under the rule of the United Kingdom. By 1947, violent conflict was on the rise in the region between the Arabs who had been living there and the large number of Jewish immigrants who had fled Europe during World War II. The UK passed Palestine’s management over to the United Nations. Though the UN proposed a two-state solution, war broke out in 1948 and one side declared its independence as the State of Israel, which controlled 77% of the UK’s previously determined territory of Palestine. Jordan and Egypt controlled the rest. In 1967, war broke out again and Israel expanded to the remaining territories: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
Broadly speaking, Palestine is the nation of Palestinians. Some countries contest whether Palestine is a state, which means that they debate things like whether Palestine should be allowed admittance to the United Nations and whether it should be acceptable for it to take actions permissible of states (like declaring war).
What is Israel?
Israel is a state founded for Jewish people. Though Israel is recognized as a legitimate state by the majority of the countries in the world and has membership in the United Nations, Hamas does not recognize its statehood. It is worth noting that Jews have lived in modern-day Israel since well before the large numbers of immigrants that came into the territory during and following WWII. Like other religions, Judaism involves a strong sense of connection to the land and the city of Jerusalem.
What is the Gaza Strip?
It is difficult to provide a wholly accepted definition of the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip is an autonomous region within Israel ruled by Hamas, who aim to liberate it from Israel and establish Palestine as a recognized state in the international community. The Gaza Strip is part of Palestine, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and is ruled by Hamas. It is a piece of land, approximately 141 sq mi, that borders the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt, and Israel and has a population of over 2 million people. It is one of the most densely populated regions of the world. It has also been described as “the world’s largest open-air prison” by people like Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. Palestinian-identifying residents living in the Gaza Strip have been heavily restricted in their physical movements and civil liberties.
This author did an amazing job on explaining such a complex topic. After reading this, I feel like I a have a good understanding of important aspects of the topic that will allow me to keep up with current events. This is an old and complicated conflict that is so personal to many people, and the author was able to eloquently balance being both clear and impartial.
Appreciate your effort in confronting such a complicated background. It’s extremely hard if not impossible to get all the details right on this, certainly in such a brief article, so I won’t nitpick. But I do have to mention a very important correction regarding the basic tenets of Hamas. You mention in both the definition of Palestine, and in describing Hamas’s aspirations, that it recognizes the 1967 borders. Sadly this is not the case. In both its original 1988 charter, and its updated 2017 charter, Hamas defines Palestine as extending: “from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south” – and repeats that this is the land it seeks to liberate. In the 1988 version, it further explicitly states this means obliterating all Jews who inhabit it. This is their appropriation of the “from the river to the sea” slogan which was previously used for decades by Palestinian resistance in a different context, to denote liberation rather than genocidal annihilation. The only concession Hamas makes to 1967 is admitting there’s a consensus on it. But it never ever says these are the borders of Palestine, or what it aspires to liberate – that remains the entire land of Israel / Palestine. And therein lies the root of the current conflict, and why the Israeli and US governments oppose negotiating with it – so it’s a pretty important detail!
Two other things: Palestinians are the people who live / have lived in Palestine for generations, centuries for some, millennia for others. Jews are also people who claim heritage in the same land, also going back for as long as several millennia (in fact, it’s very likely that some of the ancestors of modern day Palestinians were at some point Jewish). This is important to stress, since the conflict is not simply, or even mainly religious, it is about two peoples with a strong connection to a land laying claim to it, and turning this into a zero-sum game, in which both the present day Israeli government and Hamas are enthusiastic participants.