Raja SwamyOn Saturday, October 7th 2023 militants based in Gaza led by the Palestinian Islamist resistance group Hamas launched a devastating assault by land, sea and air on occupied military outposts and Israeli settlements to the north. For the first time in decades the incredibly lopsided military imbalance between the brutal Israeli occupation and the beleaguered Palestinian population was for at least a day completely transformed. Within hours Hamas and allied Palestinian militants using para-gliders, bulldozers and sheer audacity and guile, took over Israeli military outposts and attacked settlements. All in all the death toll exacted by Hamas in the settlements and military encampments of the occupation was about 1,000. This included civilians, and the western media went on a rampage making claims for instance about widespread rape and the beheading of babies by Hamas fighters, both of which claims turned out to have been unfounded.
These assertions were repeated by prominent western media sources and also the U.S. president, whose office later acknowledged that it was incorrect. The captured soldiers included high-ranking officers now being held hostage within Gaza, and Hamas has demanded a prisoner exchange with Israel since the latter holds thousands of women, men and children in its many prisons, often for years without access to any legal process. In addition, Palestinian militants destroyed tanks and took armored cars and even agricultural machinery from the settlements dotting the landscape north of Gaza, spiriting them back into Gaza. This was clearly a military operation carried out with cold and meticulous precision involving dozens of highly trained and professional fighters, and was directed primarily at the tools and symbols of the occupation. These latter included a festive gathering right outside Gaza where young Israeli men and women were in the midst of a dance party as Palestinian para-gliders swooped down from the sky. In the days that followed the predictable response from Israel began.
The Israeli defense minister announced the tightening of an already suffocating siege, promising to cut off food, electricity, water and access to humanitarian assistance, referring to Palestinians as “human animals,” deserving of no mercy. And then the merciless bombings began. Within a week more than 2,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed by airstrikes, with entire apartment buildings and homes, neighborhoods turned into rubble. More than 700 of the dead are children. Gaza’s authorities reported yesterday that no less than 45 entire families have had to be removed from the civil registry since every single living member has been killed by the bombings. Israel used white phosphorous, an extremely dangerous incendiary munition that burns through the skin down into the bones, on a pediatric hospital among other civilian targets. Hospitals are overwhelmed with more and more injured civilians now being treated on floors, and the lack of electricity and water resulting in horrendous conditions for patients.
The death toll of Palestinians will rise in the coming days, as there are no signs of international pressure to control the horrendous violence of the Israeli war machine against the defenseless civilian population. In fact the Israeli state has gone farther than it has in previous rounds of assault on Gaza, and announced its intentions to depopulate the territory, demanding that the civilian population vacate the northern part to make way for Israeli military operations, and signaling through various public statements that the goal is to forcibly expel the more than 2 million Palestinians of Gaza into Egypt. Even with these horrific statements reminiscent of the worst horrors of the second world war, western leaders have callously and without even the pretense of concern for Palestinian civilian lives, reiterated full support, with the U.S. and U.K. even sending naval squadrons to the Mediterranean and promising troops and weapons to Israel, while Germany and France have deployed brutal clampdowns targeting public protests supportive of the Palestinian people.
In order to grapple with the horrendous reality unfolding today it is important to grasp why Gaza remains such a bastion of resistance in the history of the Palestinian struggle. The vast majority of Gaza’s population traces its origins to the Nakba – the catastrophe in 1948 – when Zionist militias massacred and depopulated entire villages and towns of their Palestinian communities, and evicted tens of thousands to Gaza, often literally dumping them there in trucks with little more than the clothes on their backs. In Gaza these refugee communities had to remake their lives from scratch with no hope of ever returning to their ancestral homes that quickly were erased and renamed by the Zionist occupiers intent on creating new “Israeli” communities populated by refugees streaming in from Europe in these violently depopulated parts of Palestine.
In the 1967 war Israel occupied Gaza and within the next two decades began forcibly evicting Palestinians from about 40% of the territory in order to create settlements for 6,000 Israeli settlers, while 1.2 million Palestinians were restricted to 60% of Gaza! Unable to defend these settlements in the face of intense Palestinian resistance Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005, and thenceforth sought to try and control and subdue its population using two strategies. The first was a futile attempt to curb the growing popularity of Hamas, the Islamist party that had led the resistance against the settlements, by trying to subvert the Palestinian Legislative Elections of 2006. Despite the combined efforts of Israel, the United States and the Fatah party led Palestinian Authority (which holds power in the West Bank, and is widely seen by Palestinians as a collaborator with the Israeli occupation) to try and get Fatah to win, Hamas won by a resounding majority in Gaza. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority sought to initiate a coup against Hamas and were unsuccessful. It is after these attempts to curb Hamas in Gaza that the Israeli effort shifted drastically towards the second strategy, choking Gaza with a siege beginning in 2007.
The siege has had devastating consequences for the now more than 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza, with every aspect of their lives strictly controlled by Israel – food, water, electricity, trade, commerce, education, and health. Gazan fishers are not permitted to fish in the sea, Gazan patients cannot access life-saving medicines or healthcare. A trip for specialized medical treatment for a Palestinian in Gaza can involve having to wait hours to be transported by three different ambulances to a hospital in the West Bank. The suffering of the Palestinian people of Gaza has indeed been immense, prompting international observers to describe the territory as the worlds largest open-air prison. Racist Israeli politicians refer to Gaza as a cage, where every few years the Israeli military launches attacks ostensibly to fight “terrorism,” but in actuality producing more and more death and suffering for a population that is already enduring horrific levels of suffering. Israeli bombings of Gaza have taken place almost every year since 2007, with the most devastating attacks in 2014 in which more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed, annd tens of thousands injured. In 2018 hundreds of thousands of Palestinians led a series of non-violent protests on the northern border, in the spirit of festive defiance demanding the right to return to their homes in historic Palestine. These protests were met with brutal violence as Israel used snipers to kill hundreds and maim thousands including children, journalists, and medical aid workers. During these events Israeli settlers were reported to be watching from northern hillocks celebrating the ensuing carnage.
Today more than 80% of Gaza’s population is dependent on humanitarian aid, the same percentage officially classified as living in poverty. Generations have grown up traumatized and struggle with physical and psychological scars that only get worse with each subsequent assault from Israel, and the continued throttling of their very means of sustaining life. Even before the first Israeli bomb fell on Gaza this month, the ability of Gazan Palestinians to live was severely challenged. It is this background of hopelessness and despair that needs to be fully grasped when trying to make sense of why Hamas and its militants planned and executed the spectacular military assault on their occupiers on October 7th 2023.
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