Gaza After the Deluge
Even before Hamas’s attack on October 7, the Israeli state knew it couldn’t subject Gaza to an unlivable siege forever. Now Israel’s rage has turned huge swathes of the densely populated territory into a howling wasteland.
Search and rescue efforts for those trapped under rubble continue after Israeli airstrikes hit a civil residential area in al Maghazi refugee camp, Gaza, on December 25, 2023. (Ashraf Amra / Anadolu via Getty Images)
On October 7, 2023, hundreds of Palestinian militants burst the gates of Gaza, overwhelmed military installations, and rampaged across southern Israel. The operation was shocking in its boldness, the ensuing massacre for its brutality. But the conditions that led to the Hamas attack were long-standing. Gaza is a speck of coastline that is among the most densely populated areas on earth. Some 75 percent of its inhabitants are refugees, driven from their homes to make way for the State of Israel in 1948, and their descendants. Israel occupied the strip in 1967 and de facto annexed it without extending rights of citizenship to the inhabitants. After Palestinians revolted against Israeli military rule, in 1987 (the first intifada), Israel crushed the uprising, then strengthened its grip on Gaza through various forms of confinement. By 2004, the head of Israel’s National Security Council could describe Gaza as “a huge concentration camp.” In January 2006, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, won democratic elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel and its allies responded by subjecting the occupied Palestinian population — already enduring the “worst economic depression in modern history” — to “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.” After Hamas consolidated control in Gaza the following year, Israel tightened the screws further as it put Gaza under a comprehensive closure that has been enforced with varying degrees of intensity ever since.
The siege extinguished Gaza’s economy and reduced its people to penury. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,” a senior Israeli official explained, “but not to make them die of hunger.” The unemployment rate soared to “probably the highest in the world,” four-fifths of the population were forced to rely on humanitarian assistance, three-quarters became dependent on food aid, more than half faced “acute food insecurity,” one in ten children were stunted by malnutrition, and over 96 percent of potable water became unsafe for human consumption.
The head of the United Nations (UN) agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, observed in 2008 that
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