Even before Israel’s most recent bombardment of Gaza, conditions there were dire. The strip is home to 2.2 million people — mostly refugees — and is 365 square kilometers wide (141 square miles) and 41 kilometers long (25 miles). It is completely besieged under Israeli military occupation, by air, land, and sea.
Since 2005, about 5,855 people have lived per square kilometer, under total lockdown. The following year, Hamas was elected in Gaza. Nothing coming in or out of the strip is under the full control of the Palestinians: it can only be described as the largest open-air prison on Earth. Deprived of basic human rights — such as access to clean water, medicine, and electricity — Palestinians in Gaza suffer in other ways. Under the Occupation, they have limited and weak internet access, a lack of mobility in and out of the strip, inadequate healthcare facilities, few employment opportunities, and no political or social rights.
In 2005, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser — Dov Weisglass — described Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza as “disengagement [that] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary, so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” This calculated disengagement — orchestrated by war criminals who carried out massacres throughout the late 20th century — was a strategy to divide, rule, and kill the Palestinian national project. Furthermore, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was done unilaterally and without coordination with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) or the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has led to institutional and political divisions that have now been in existence for nearly two decades.
As a result of the ensuing blockade, Gazans have endured numerous major military raids and incursions by Israel since 2007. During this period, Hamas has relied on rocket fire as a negotiating tactic to pressure Israel into easing the conditions of the blockade and allowing limited access of goods and people. However, Palestinians in Gaza have paid a heavy price for this, because the Israeli regime employs all its might to kill Palestinians from the air. Today, Hamas is utilizing coercive diplomacy by taking Israelis hostage, to use them as bargaining chips during negotiations to end the blockade and secure the release of thousands of Palestinians — including women and children — who are being held illegally in Israeli prisons.
The events of the last few days mark a historic and natural human yearning for freedom. For years, Palestinians in Gaza have been contained, cruelly and unjustly, in a pressure cooker, denied all basic human rights. Thousands have been killed over time, including entire families, ensuring that the situation would erupt at any given moment.
It is important to note that the right to self-defense is preserved in international law, particularly Article 31, of the Rome Statue, which guarantees the right of peoples to defend themselves against aggression — particularly war crimes. The Israeli regime has been committing genocide and war crimes against the Palestinian people uninterruptedly for 75 years.
Diplomacy and multilateralism have failed the 2.2 million Palestinians living in Gaza; numerous condemnations by international organizations have fallen on deaf ears and have not netted actual, concrete changes for Gaza, given the immense power of the well-organized and amply-financed Israeli lobby. Brutal, recurrent Israeli aggressions have resulted in the execution of thousands of Palestinians, including over a 1,000 children and multigenerational families, as well as the destruction of the quality of life of Palestinians, particularly Gazans. Each accelerated aggression – such as the current bombardment – turned Gaza into a disaster zone and reduced it to rubble.
The people have been left traumatized. Many survivors have no will to live. The youth have little opportunity. In 2018, 40,000 mostly young and educated Palestinians left Gaza for Turkey and Europe. Gaza is a lush source of Palestinian natural and human resources — the people and the land of the strip are vital to the general Palestinian economy. The illegal blockade of Gaza and the unlawful occupation serves as a particularly grotesque form of structural violence and collective punishment that cannot be ignored. This situation has left the Palestinians with an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Above all, the loss of hope prevails.
What is happening in Gaza has been standard practice for Israeli settlers since the inception of the apartheid state. For 75 years, Western powers and international organizations have stood by as Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have acted with impunity, oppressing the Palestinian people under prolonged military occupation, with the support of Western financing and weapons.
While humanitarian aid is crucial to the millions who are still holding refugee status — even after 75 years — the priority should be ending the Occupation. The recent flurry of international statements of condemnations of Hamas and unconditional support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascist Israeli administration will only fuel more state-organized terror against Palestinians and more impunity for the regime’s continued crimes and collective punishment of the innocents in Gaza.
Since 2000, the IOF and settlers have murdered more than 11,000 Palestinians, while countless more have died from starvation, a collapsed medical system, injuries, poor air quality, and undrinkable water, all the results of the Zionist siege. In just the past six days, during the latest incursion, the IOF have already killed more than 2,000 additional Palestinians in Gaza through bombs and chemical weapons, while having also shot and killed hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank and the ‘48 territories.
Israel is sustaining an Occupation with financial aid, free weapons, and institutional support from Western powers, ensuring that Jewish supremacy reigns over all of historic Palestine. Rather than being prosecuted for violations of the Geneva Convention, the Zionist regime’s ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous population has been amply rewarded, while Palestinian resistance is criminalized both in Occupied Palestine and around the world.
The global community has tolerated — if not outright supported — Zionist colonialism in Palestine. This has taken place through annexations, expulsions, renewed and consistent attacks on refugees, destroyed villages, rapes, maiming, the detention and torture of minors, expropriations and disposessions, the isolation of Jerusalem, and numerous other crimes against humanity.
It is shocking to hear condemnations of Palestinian resistance after 75 years of an ongoing Nakba and 17 years of total siege on Gaza. It is a matter of life and death to shift the international rhetoric towards ending Israeli occupation, apartheid, and impunity. Conscious citizens in positions of influence must center the root causes of the oppression in historic Palestine.
The genocidal Israeli regime has left Palestinians with no option but to resist by any means necessary. This is what Operation Al-Aqsa Flood shows us.
The opportunity is ripe for Gaza’s leadership to practice coercive diplomacy. This sudden development will increase efforts to slow the Israeli-led carnage and increase the chances of a breakthrough. The state of emergency launched by Netanyahu may make the possibility of normalization with Saudi Arabia less likely, or… it may not. But it has invited further American intervention in the region. The resistance, however, has succeeded in bringing back the stick and strengthening the Palestinian position in any normalization or bilateral negotiations. In the near future, it may be possible to leverage Israeli captives in a future exchange for Palestinian prisoners, reminding the world that Gaza is very much a part of Palestine. There must be accountability for Israeli crimes against humanity, and there must be protection for the Palestinian people. But, above all, the siege needs to be lifted, and the Occupation must end.