Palestinians in Gaza marked the grim milestone of 1,000 days of Israel’s genocidal war on 7 July. Since October 2023, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including at least 20,000 children. These are just the victims identified by the Gaza Ministry of Health: the real death toll could be double that, with tens of thousands buried beneath the rubble.
Last month, a United Nations report documented the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children, killed by single sniper or drone shots, often in the head or upper torso. The report also documents targeted attacks on hospitals, schools and orphanages, contributing to preventable child deaths, long-term disability and educational collapse.
Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has documented the appalling conditions faced by Palestinian prisoners. In August 2024, it published a report, titled “Welcome to Hell”, which draws on the testimony of 55 former prisoners to unearth “unrelenting physical and psychological violence, denial of medical treatment, starvation, withholding of water, sleep deprivation and confiscation of all personal belongings”.
A follow up report, “Living Hell”, released in January, provides further testimony demonstrating that Israeli prisons operate as a network of torture camps in which “physical and psychological abuse, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation and denial of medical care” are rife, and lead to numerous prisoner deaths.
Together these reports evidence Israel’s utter barbarism.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Yet, around the world, governments continue to roll out the red carpet for Israel’s genocidists. Israeli President Isaac Herzog was welcomed in Australia in February, while Netanyahu met US President Donald Trump in Washington a week later.
On 26 May, Defence Minister Israel Katz restated Israel’s intent to implement a plan for large numbers of Palestinians to leave Gaza “at the right time and in the right manner”. Two days later, Netanyahu declared his troops would take direct control of 70 percent of Gaza, in defiance of a ceasefire US brokered by the Trump administration in January 2025 that Israel has routinely ignored.
Gaza’s 2 million residents are now confined to just a third of the Gaza Strip—an area of just 365 square kilometres. The vast majority are forced to live in tents and have little access to clean water or basic amenities. Malnutrition in children is now widespread and growing at an alarming rate, according to UNICEF.
While Israel has greatly accelerated its efforts to ethnically cleanse Gaza since 7 October 2023, the settler-colonial state has long desired the expulsion of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, which it has occupied continuously since 1967. In the subsequent decades, Israel has sought to tighten the noose on Gaza in numerous ways, including a succession of military offensives, bombardment, settlement and siege.
The origin of oppression
Before the May 1948 declaration of the State of Israel, Gaza was a subdistrict within British mandate Palestine. British rule paved the way for the creation of Israel. During the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt, British troops brutally quashed a strike wave, working with the Haganah (Zionist paramilitaries). When the revolt ended, an estimated one in ten Palestinian men had been executed, wounded, imprisoned or expelled.
This left Palestinians ill equipped to resist the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing that followed. During the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), the Haganah (subsequently incorporated into the Israeli military) launched a campaign to expel Palestinians from more than 500 villages. Around 750,000 people—two-thirds of the Palestinian population—were forced to flee their homes. Many in the south of Palestine arrived in the Gaza Strip, a small sliver of land that remained under Egyptian administration after the British exodus, following an armistice agreement with the new state of Israel.
In April and May 1948, Gaza alone received 10,000 refugees from Jaffa, a coastal city to the north. By the end of 1949, Gaza’s population had more than trebled with the arrival of at least 200,000 refugees from across Palestine. Eight refugee camps were established across the Strip. The largest, Jabalia, had a population of 35,000 in 1948. Nuseirat, a former British Army camp, sheltered 16,000 refugees on less than one square kilometre of land.
Like Gaza’s contemporary tent cities, these camps were plagued by overcrowding, hunger and disease. In the winter of 1948, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that ten children were dying every day in the Khan Younis camp. With the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in late 1949, refugees received some relief. However, any attempt to return to their home villages inside Israel was fraught with danger: those discovered could be shot on sight.
In 1955, refugee camps across Gaza were rocked by a series of demonstrations, referred to by Palestinians as an intifada. The demonstrations were provoked by an Israeli raid that killed 36 Egyptian soldiers and two Palestinian civilians, including a young boy. Palestinians were incensed that Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime had failed to protect Palestinian refugees or allow them to be armed. Additionally, the mass protests thwarted an Egyptian plan, with US backing, to resettle 12,000 Palestinian refugees in the Sinai, in violation of their right of return.
In November 1956, Israel invaded and occupied Gaza for the first time. Its stated objective was to remove hostile militants. During the four-month occupation, “the Israeli army imposed a brutal regime on Gaza characterised by war crimes and massacres”, according to Anne Irfan, author of A Short History of the Gaza Strip.
Some 1,500 Palestinians were killed by Israeli occupation forces. In scenes reminiscent of today, the army lined up men and boys against the wall and shot them; others were forcibly disappeared, their bodies later discovered in mass graves.
Prior to Israel’s creation, the Zionist movement’s principal imperial sponsor was Britain. In the aftermath of World War Two, with the British Empire in rapid decline, the Soviet Union and the United States competed for influence in the oil-rich Middle East. The USSR backed Israel’s foundation, but it was ultimately the US to which Israel turned.
In June 1967, Israel launched the Six Day War on three fronts, capturing Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Palestinians in Gaza now found themselves cut off from Egypt but allowed access to other parts of historic Palestine for the first time in two decades. The US came to view Israel as its key strategic partner in the Middle East, having demonstrated its military prowess against much weaker Arab armies.
In the years leading up to the Six Day War, an increasingly confident Palestinian guerrilla movement, known as the fedayeen, had carried out numerous raids into Israeli territory, many of them from Gaza. In this period, Gaza was connected to the outside world via Cairo. Argentinian/Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, African American activist Malcolm X and French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir all visited Gaza’s refugee camps in the mid-1960s, pledging their support for the Palestinian liberation movement.
Many Palestinians had suffered persecution from Nasser’s regime, but, after the Six Day War, their situation became immeasurably worse. While Israeli citizens were subject to civilian law, Palestinians in the occupied territories were, and still are, subject to military law. Restrictions on travel, trade, land ownership and building permits ensured that both Gaza and the West Bank could not develop economically independently of Israel.
Furthermore, Zionists had long regarded Gaza and the West Bank as integral parts of Greater Israel. However, they could not annex the Palestinians territories without first expelling their populations for fear that they posed a “demographic threat”. Thus, genocidal language has long been the vernacular of Israel’s leaders.
In the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, musing over the problem of what to do with Gaza’s Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Levy Eshkol said: “I was there in 1956 and saw venomous snakes walking in the street. We should settle some of them in the Sinai, and hopefully the others will immigrate”.
However, Israel’s depopulation efforts came up against regional resistance and the refusal of Palestinians to comply. The Nakba had burned into the Palestinian psyche that emigration would be permanent; that Israel would never cede their right to return.
Intifadas and compromises
During the 1970s and 1980s, a growing number of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank entered Israel as guest workers. From the perspective of Israel, Palestinians were a cheap labour force, and their integration into the Israeli economy was seen as a means of pacification. However, working days for Palestinians were long and arduous, and their jobs were concentrated in low-waged service industries. Palestinian workers paid Israeli taxes yet received none of the benefits: state investment in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) went not to Palestinians but to serve Israeli settlers.
In Gaza, simmering discontent exploded on 8 December 1987, when an Israeli vehicle crashed into four Palestinians near the Jabalia refugee camp, killing all of them. Widely seen by Palestinians as a revenge attack for the earlier killing of an Israeli settler, the incident proved to be the spark that ignited the First Intifada. Across the OPT, Palestinians went on strike, refusing to work for Israeli businesses, boycotted Israeli goods and refused to pay the occupiers’ taxes. Demonstrations became widespread.
For a period, the First Intifada relaunched the Palestinian struggle on the international stage, winning enormous public sympathy, especially in the Arab world. However, the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose leaders had been forced into exile in Tunisia following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, began to reassert itself in the diplomatic arena, having been relegated to a back seat by the grassroots uprising.
In 1988, PLO chair Yasser Arafat announced the declaration of the State of Palestine in the territories Israel had occupied in 1967, giving de facto recognition to Israel. In September 1993, the first of the Oslo Accords was signed, the PLO renouncing “violence and terrorism” (i.e. armed struggle) and agreeing to establish a Palestinian Authority deprived of any control over borders, trade or airspace and with no defence capability. This was the beginning of a policy of “security coordination” in which the PA was tasked not with defending Palestinians but with policing them as subcontractors for the occupation.
The Oslo Accords were aptly described by Palestinian author Edward Said as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”. All matters in contention—the right of return, the status of Jerusalem (which Palestinians long viewed as their capital) and final borders—were postponed to the indefinite future. This historic betrayal set in motion greater integration of the OPT into the Israeli economy, and a massive expansion of Israeli settlements and, with them, Israel’s security apparatus.
In 1998, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon encouraged Israeli settlers to seize ever more Palestinian land, telling a radio audience: “Everyone there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory”.
The twenty-first century
Two years later, Sharon became prime minister. In September 2000, he provoked a storm of protest when he visited Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The harsh repression that followed provoked the Second Intifada, a new Palestinian uprising that proved far more violent than the first. Between 2000 and 2005, the PA’s security forces battled to contain armed Palestinian factions, while Israeli occupation forces killed at least 4,973 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
Inside Gaza, the situation had become dire. In 1996, Israel built a 60-kilometre-long “security barrier” along the Strip’s perimeter and banned any entry from Gaza, depriving tens of thousands of Palestinians of work in Israel. By 2000, nearly a third of the population was living below the poverty line, increasingly dependent upon foreign aid. During the Oslo years, child labour increased while school enrolment rates dropped. Child beggars began to appear on Gaza’s streets.
Doron Almog, then the chief of the military’s southern command, boasted that Israel was policing Gaza’s perimeter: “We established observation points equipped with the best technology and our troops were allowed to fire at anyone reaching the fence at a distance of six kilometres”.
In 2005, Sharon ordered the unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli settlements from Gaza, not as a gesture of peace, but to remove them from the line of Hamas rocket fire and to facilitate subsequent Israeli military incursions. Meanwhile, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s failure to agree to a further capitulation at Camp David talks in 2000 led to him being sidelined by the US and placed under house arrest by Israeli occupation forces. Under US pressure, Arafat agreed to Mahmoud Abbas becoming the PA’s first prime minister. In 2004, after Arafat died, Abbas succeeded Arafat as PLO chair and Palestinian president. He faced an election only once, in 2005, but has continued to govern without a presidential mandate ever since.
In the wake of the Second Intifada, Abbas was tasked with rebuilding the Palestinian Authority as a repressive force. On 25 January 2006, legislative elections were held across the OPT, largely at the behest of the US government, which (wrongly) calculated that elections would lend legitimacy to Abbas’s quisling authority. Despite an influx of US$2.3 million in US aid, Fatah lost the elections to the Hamas “Change and Reform” list, which secured 44 percent of the vote and 74 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, compared with 41 percent and 45 seats for Fatah. Hamas had boycotted the 1996 election on the grounds that it did not recognise the PLC and other governing institutions established under the Oslo Accords.
Abbas was determined that Fatah would not cede power to Hamas. Tensions between the two factions mounted. In June 2006, pitched battles ensued between Hamas and Fatah fighters in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel used the pretext of rocket fire from Gaza to launch a four-month military offensive in 2006 that killed 526 Palestinians.
In early 2007, following Saudi-sponsored negotiations, Hamas and Fatah agreed to establish a national unity government. The initiative, however, did not last long. The US refused to provide aid to any administration in which Hamas had a role, and Israel declared it would not pass on Palestinian tax revenue (around US$55 million a month).
Determined to oust Hamas, the US approved a covert initiative to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The Bush administration armed 1,400 fighters under the command of Fatah security chief and Abbas loyalist Mohammed Dahlan. Hamas, in turn, secured Iranian support to boost its fighting force. Predictably, another armed conflict erupted.
The outcome, however, was not what the US intended: Hamas secured control of Gaza, driving out Fatah. Abbas responded by dissolving the national unity government and forming a Fatah-dominated cabinet headed by the neoliberal technocrat Salam Fayyad. Two rival Palestinian authorities now ruled over the OPT: one in Gaza, led by Hamas leader Ismael Hanieh, and another in Ramallah, which administered the West Bank, led by Abbas as president and Fayyad as prime minister.
From this point onwards, Israel imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza by air, land and sea, denying entry and exit of both people and goods. Gaza’s fishermen were prohibited from venturing more than three nautical miles off the coast under threat of being fired upon by Israeli patrols. Israel employed new technology to enforce its open-air prison. As Irfan observes, Gaza’s blockade was now imposed “not only by razor-wire fences, concrete walls and military watchtowers, but also by drones, CCTV, radar sensors, spy balloons, sonic imagery, and remote-controlled machine guns, bulldozers and boats”.
All “non-essential” goods were banned, including numerous construction materials, notebooks, newspapers and even musical instruments, allegedly on security grounds. Israeli government adviser Dov Weisglass explained: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”.
The US-allied Egyptian military dictatorship also played its part in Gaza’s collective punishment, routinely closing the southern Rafah crossing. Palestinians in Gaza now relied on a comprehensive network of secret tunnels to smuggle goods and people in and out of Gaza.
By 2021, after fifteen years of blockade, UNRWA reported that more than four in five of Gaza’s population lived below the poverty line, and unemployment stood at 47 percent. As a consequence of Israel’s deliberate destruction of water infrastructure, 81 percent of water extracted from Gaza aquifers did not meet World Health Organization standards.
Dramatically compounding Gaza’s woes was the cumulative impact of a series of Israeli military operations in 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2014, during which the territory was carpet bombed and invaded. Israel’s successive military interventions were dubbed “mowing the lawn”, a deliberate strategy of degrading Hamas’ military capability while keeping them in power.
On 7 October 2023, when Palestinian militant groups, led by Hamas fighters, broke through Gaza’s perimeter fence to launch a series of deadly attacks on both military and civilian targets in southern Israel, the Netanyahu government seized upon the moment to impose a “final solution” upon Gaza’s population.
Since 2023, the Gaza genocide has wreaked an unprecedented toll of death and destruction upon Palestinians, more deadly and destructive than the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Six Day War and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon combined. The cities of Gaza, Khan Younis and Rafah are no more. Gaza now resembles a hellscape with its entire population displaced and infrastructure destroyed.
Yet, the tragedy that has befallen the Palestinians was a deliberate act, a crime decades in the making. Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has described Israel’s war on Palestine as a “hundred years’ war”, dating its origins back to the 1917 declaration of Lord Balfour that promised British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Many others have drawn connections between ethnic cleansing of Palestine during the 1948 Nakba and Israel’s present-day genocide.
Many countries—not only the US, but also Australia and many others—are deeply complicit, providing both the military hardware and diplomatic cover to make Israel’s crimes possible. In Australia, Israel’s supporters in the corridors of power and in the media have sought to smear Palestine supporters as “antisemites” to hide their own role in aiding and abetting a genocide.
If “Never Again” means never again for anyone, we must not only tear down the walls that imprison and oppress Palestinians but the very system that perpetuates such madness.
Nick Everett is the chair of Friends of Palestine WA.
