Israel's war against the Gaza Strip, following the terrorist carnage perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, is by far the deadliest in the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is, however, the 15th war Israel has waged against the Palestinian enclave since the initial hostilities of 1948, which transformed the prosperous oasis of Gaza, a crossroads of trade between Egypt and the Levant for thousands of years, into a "strip" of territory defined by the ceasefire between Israel and Egypt. While Israel absorbed 77% of the territory of former Palestine and Jordan annexed 22%, the "Gaza Strip," administered by Egypt without being annexed to it, was home to a quarter of Palestine's Arab population on 1% of its historic territory.
Two-thirds of the inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave, whose density already worried observers at the time, were refugees from all over Palestine, hence the pivotal role assumed from the outset by UNRWA, the United Nations agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees, which became the Gaza Strip's leading employer and service provider. The overwhelming majority of refugees also contributed to Gaza's transformation into a melting pot for Palestinian nationalism, driven by the armed struggle of the fedayeen.
After the first war of 1948, the next five wars were waged by Israel in a vain attempt to eradicate Palestinian nationalism. First came the "border war," which saw Israel establish a security belt of militarized kibbutzim on the edge of the Palestinian enclave, with a cycle of low-intensity hostilities between Palestinian "infiltrations" and Israeli "reprisals." This was followed by the first Israeli occupation of Gaza, from November 1956 to March 1957, which was all the more bloody as it was intended to eliminate the fedayeen and their networks, an elimination that would not be effective until the restoration of Egyptian control.
This was followed by the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of June 1967, after which the Israeli army once again occupied the Palestinian enclave. However, this lightning victory did not spare Israel from a laborious "four-year war" against low-intensity Palestinian guerrilla warfare, which was only defeated, under the leadership of General Ariel Sharon, by the destruction of part of the enclave and the emergence of an Islamist alternative to the nationalist movement. During the ensuing "shadow war," Israeli services mobilized the Muslim Brotherhood of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the future founder of Hamas, against supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
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