The Gaza–Israel conflict is a localized part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict beginning in 1948, when about 200,000 of the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes settled in the Gaza Strip as refugees. Since then, Israel and Palestinian militant groups have fought 15 wars in the Gaza Strip. The number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza war (ongoing since 2023) (73,000+) is higher than the combined death toll of all other wars in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Israel fought three wars in the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip: the 1948 Palestine war, the Suez Crisis during which Israel first occupied Gaza for a period of four months, and the Six-Day War in 1967 during which Israel captured Gaza from Egypt. During the first Israeli occupation, 1% of the Gaza Strip's population was killed, tortured, or imprisoned by Israel. Following two periods of low-level Palestinian insurgency, a major uprising against Israeli rule erupted in 1987, starting a period of unrest known as the First Intifada. The 1993 Oslo Accords brought a period of relative calm which was nevertheless disrupted by various events, including Israeli settler violence, suicide attacks by Palestinian militant groups, the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
In 2000, the Second Intifada began. In 2005, towards the end of the Second Intifada, Israel disengaged from Gaza. Shortly thereafter, Hamas won the 2006 election in Gaza and seized control of the Strip in 2007. That same year, Israel imposed a land, air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, turning it into an "open-air prison". The blockade was widely condemned as a form of collective punishment, while Israel defended it as necessary to stop Palestinian rocket attacks. Hamas considered it a declaration of war.
The 2008–2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza resulted in more than 1,000 deaths and widespread destruction of homes, schools and hospitals. A 2012 Israeli operation also killed more than 100 people. In 2014, Israel invaded Gaza in a major war that resulted in the deaths of 73 Israelis (mostly soldiers) and 2,251 Palestinians (mostly civilians). The invasion resulted in "unprecedented" destruction, damaging 25% of homes in Gaza City and 70% of homes in Beit Hanoun. After 2014, notable events in the conflict included the "Great March of Return" (2018–2019) and clashes in November 2018, May 2019 and November 2019. The 2021 crisis saw 256 Palestinians and 15 Israelis killed.
On 7 October 2023, Palestinian militants attacked Israel, killing 1,195 people (mostly civilians), committing war crimes, taking hostages, and beginning the Gaza war. Israel responded by invading and bombing the Gaza Strip, killing more than 73,000 Gazans as of September 2026 and causing a humanitarian crisis and famine. Many scholarly sources and international organizations have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza constitute genocide.
Background
The Green Line of the 1949 Armistice Agreements that formally ended the 1948 Palestine war formally established the territories of the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel in what had been Mandatory Palestine at the start of the war.
Israel and Gaza have fought six wars since their establishment.
Military engagements
1948 Palestine War
In Operation Barak, part of Plan Dalet, the Zionist offensive in the civil war phase aiming to capture territory in advance of the establishment of the State of Israel, the Givati Brigade of the Haganah attacked, depopulated, and demolished Arab villages north of Gaza.
On 22 December, large IDF forces started Operation Horev. Its objective was to encircle the Egyptian Army in the Gaza Strip and force the Egyptians to end the war. The operation was a decisive Israeli victory, and Israeli raids into the Nitzana area and the Sinai Peninsula forced the Egyptian army into the Gaza Strip, where it was surrounded. Israeli forces withdrew from Sinai and Gaza under international pressure and after the British threatened to intervene against Israel.
The Green Line established in the 1949 Armistice Agreements at the end of the war, which delineated the boundaries of the Gaza Strip, corresponded to the military front of the 1948 war. The All-Palestine Protectorate (September 1948 – 1959) was established in the territory under the control of the Kingdom of Egypt and, after the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the Republic of Egypt.
Suez Crisis
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip for four months during the Suez Crisis in 1956. During this occupation, 930–1,200 Palestinians were killed, most notably in the Khan Younis massacre and Rafah massacre. In total, about 1% of the population of the Gaza Strip was either killed, wounded, tortured or imprisoned by Israel. In 1957, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip after American pressure.
1967 war
In the 1967 war, Israel occupied Gaza Strip, along with Sinai, Golan Heights and the West Bank. During the war, and shortly after, between 40,000 and 45,000 civilians fled or were expelled from the Gaza Strip. Many Palestinian civilians were killed as they fled. On 11 June, a grenade killed 8 Gaza civilians and a shooting killed another 10.
After the 1967 war, several Israeli leaders argued against turning the Armistice Demarcation Lines into permanent borders on the grounds of Israeli security:
- Prime Minister Golda Meir said the pre-1967 borders were so dangerous that it "would be treasonable" for an Israeli leader to accept them (The New York Times, December 23, 1969).
- The Foreign Minister Abba Eban said the pre-1967 borders have "a memory of Auschwitz" (Der Spiegel, November 5, 1969).
- Prime Minister Menachem Begin described a proposal for a retreat to the pre-1967 borders as "national suicide for Israel."
First Intifada
During the First Intifada, in the Gaza Strip alone, 142 Palestinians were killed, while no Israelis died: 77 were shot dead, and 37 died from tear-gas inhalation. Seventeen died from beatings at the hand of Israeli police or soldiers.
Israel–Gaza barrier
Israel completed the initial Gaza–Israel barrier in 1996. It has helped reduce infiltration from Gaza Strip into Israel. Special permits to enter Israel for medical purposes were also greatly reduced, which has made travel for Palestinians difficult.
Daniel Schueftan, in his 1999 book, Disengagement: Israel and the Palestinian Entity ("The Need for Separation: Israel and the Palestinian Authority"), reviews new and existing arguments underlying different separation stances, in order to make the case for separation from the Palestinians, beginning with those in the West Bank and Gaza. Schueftan favors the "hard separation" stances of politicians like Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak.
Yitzhak Rabin was the first to propose the creation of a physical barrier between the Israeli and Palestinian populations in 1992, and by 1994, construction on the first barrier—the Israel–Gaza barrier—had begun; it is actually a wire fence equipped with sensors. Following an attack on Bet Lid, near the city of Netanya, Rabin specified the objectives behind the undertaking, stating that:
This path must lead to a separation, though not according to the borders prior to 1967. We want to reach a separation between us and them. We do not want the majority of the Jewish residents of the state of Israel, 98% of whom live within the borders of sovereign Israel, including a united Jerusalem, to be subject to terrorism."
Second Intifada
The Second Intifada, also known as the al-Aqsa Intifada, began in September 2000. Many Palestinians considered the Intifada to be a struggle of national liberation against Israeli occupation imposed on them following the 1967 War, whereas many Israelis considered it to be a terrorist campaign.
Palestinian tactics ranged from carrying out mass protests and general strikes, as in the First Intifada, to mounting suicide bombing attacks and firing Qassam rockets into southeastern Israeli residential areas. Israeli tactics ranged from conducting mass arrests and locking up Palestinians in administrative detention to setting up checkpoints and building the Israeli Gaza Strip barrier and West Bank barrier to carrying out assassinations targeting militants and leaders of Palestinian organizations.
After the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, Israel negotiated with Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO, but simultaneously targeted and bombed Hamas activists and militants and arrested Hamas's elected legislative council politicians.
The death toll, both military and civilian, over the entire period in question (2000–2007) is estimated to be over 4,300 Palestinians and over 1,000 Israelis; 64 foreign citizens were also killed (54 by Palestinians, and 10 by Israeli security forces).
Israel's unilateral disengagement
Israel implemented its Disengagement Plan in August–September 2005, withdrawing its civilian and military presence from the Gaza Strip, and retaining control over the Gaza airspace, maritime access and borders even with Egypt according to the 2005 agreement with the Palestinian authority. Qassam rockets were fired regularly prior to the Israeli disengagement and the frequency of Qassam attacks increased after the Disengagement from Gaza. Palestinian militants have targeted a number of military bases and civilian towns in Southern Israel.
Since 2001, Palestinian militants have launched thousands of rocket and mortar attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing, injuring and traumatizing Israeli civilians.
In July 2006, Israel briefly re-occupied parts of northern Gaza Strip and used the occupied areas as bases for raids into Jabalya and Beit Lahya. Hamas responded by launching rockets.
Ascendancy of Hamas
When the Islamic party Hamas won the January 2006 Palestinian legislative election, gaining a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, the conflict between Israel and Gaza intensified. Israel sealed its border with the Gaza Strip, largely preventing the free flow of people and many imports and exports. Palestinians shot Qassam rockets at Israeli settlements located near the Gaza borders, and staged cross-border raids aimed at killing or capturing Israeli soldiers. In one such raid, on 25 June 2006, Palestinians captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, leading to massive retaliation by the Israeli army which included air strikes against Hamas targets.
In June 2007, internal fighting broke out between Hamas and Fatah, and Hamas fully consolidated its power by staging an armed coup d'état and taking control of the Gaza Strip. Following the internecine fighting that occurred between 7 and 15 June 2007, also known as the Battle of Gaza in which 118 Palestinians were killed and over 550 were wounded, the entire Gaza Strip came under full control of a Hamas government.
As a response to the Hamas takeover, Israel sharply restricted the flow of people and goods into and out of Gaza. About 70% of Gaza's workforce became unemployed or without pay, and about 80% of its residents lived in poverty.
Since Hamas' takeover, Palestinian armed groups in Gaza and Israel continued to clash. Palestinian armed groups fired rockets into Israel, killing Israeli civilians, including children, and wounding others, as well as causing damage to infrastructure; and Israel launched attacks and shelled Gaza with artillery, killing Palestinian combatants as well as civilians, including children, and causing devastating damage to infrastructure. According to Human Rights Watch, the Palestinian deliberate attacks against civilians violated international humanitarian law. Because Hamas exercised power inside Gaza, it was responsible for stopping unlawful attacks even when carried out by other groups.
2006–2007
Large-scale conventional warfare beyond the peripheries of the Gaza Strip began when Palestinian militants abducted Corporal Gilad Shalit, and Israel responded by launching Operation "Summer Rains" on 28 June 2006. The operation became the first major mobilization within the Gaza Strip since Israel unilaterally disengaged from the region between August and September 2005.
The Gaza beach blast was an event on 9 June 2006 in which eight Palestinians were killed—including nearly the entire family of seven-year-old Huda Ghaliya—and at least thirty others were injured in an explosion on a beach near the municipality of Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip. The incident received considerable attention from news media worldwide, with blame for the explosion hotly disputed in the following weeks.
Israel maintains that it mobilized thousands of troops in order to suppress Qassam rocket fire against its civilian population and to secure the release of Gilad Shalit. It is estimated that between 7,000 and 9,000 Israeli artillery shells were fired into Gaza between September 2005 and June 2006, killing 80 Palestinians in 6 months. On the Palestinian side, over 1,300 Qassam rockets have been fired into Israel from September 2000 to 21 December 2006. Israeli forces also continued to search for tunnels, used by militants to smuggle weapons, as well as monitor operations at checkpoints (with some assistance from the European Union at Rafah) for security reasons, specifically possible weapons transfers and uninhibited return of exiled extremist leaders and terrorists. As of 18 October 2006, Israel has discovered 20 tunnels used for illegal arms smuggling under the border of the Gaza Strip and Egypt.
Israel had said it would withdraw from the Strip and end the operation as soon as Shalit was released. The Palestinians had said that they were willing to return Shalit in exchange for the release of some of the Palestinians held in Israeli jails. The Palestinians and others have also said the assault was aimed at toppling the democratically elected Hamas-led government and at destabilizing the Palestinian National Authority, citing the targeting of civilian infrastructure such as a power station and the captures of government and parliament members. Some 300 Palestinians had been targeted by the IDF in the Gaza Strip since the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit.
In July 2006, first reports emerged about mystery injuries after Israeli attacks. Previously unseen injuries included severely damaged internal organs, severe internal burning and deep internal wounds often resulting in amputations or death. Bodies arrived severely fragmented, melted and disfigured. There were speculations about a new experimental weapon, particularly Dense inert metal explosives (DIMEs).
Attempting to curb Qassam rocket attacks fired at Southern Israel by Palestinian militants from the northern Gaza Strip, Israel launched Operation "Autumn Clouds" on 1 November 2006.