Introduction
On 7 October 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian Armed Groups (PAG) launched a highly coordinated attack on Israel’s military and security defences on the Gaza border as well as its southern ‘envelope’ communities. Coined “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, the Gaza-based groups quickly overwhelmed their Israeli targets, killing an estimated 1,200 and taking approximately 250 back to Gaza to be subsequently held as hostages.
The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the members of his newly formed war cabinet hit back hard. Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant announced action not just against Hamas and the other PAG, but the entire 2.3 million Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza; “I have ordered a
complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said.[1]
The following day, 9 October, as he addressed Israeli troops on the border of Gaza, he declared:
I have released all restraints … You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza. This is what we are fighting against … Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week, it will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.[2]
The Israeli bombardment that followed, starting in northern Gaza, targeting the Palestinian towns, villages and lands around Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, down Salah al-Din Street, through Al Falouja to Jabalia and its massive refugee camp drove on over the successive twelve months to cover the entirety of the Gaza Strip. In terms of loss, thousands of Palestinians have been left bereaved of their children, daughters, sisters, aunts, nieces, and wives in a landscape of destruction, death, and injury.
One year on more than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, nearly 100,000 have been severely wounded, while countless others have been disappeared by Israel’s assaults; lost to the rubble. The Israeli army has wrought almost total destruction of Gaza’s built environment and infrastructure including schools, universities, clinics, hospitals, water, sewage and electricity stations, play parks, libraries. According to the UN 200,000 Gazans can no longer be counted in its official population statistics.[3] Indeed, as one of the world’s most densely populated urban spaces Israel has systematically destroyed that space to deny Hamas and the other armed groups the advantage it enjoyed in this asymmetric conflict. Additionally, conflagration has engulfed the region.
It is against this backdrop that we examine the future of the war on Gaza. Though there is a growing set of regional and global dynamics that also lead us to question the future of the wider Middle East, unfortunately that is not within the scope of this paper.
[1] Emanuel Fabian, “Defense minister announces ‘complete siege’ of Gaza: No power, food or fuel,”
The Times of Israel, 9/10/2023, accessed on 29/10/2024, at:
https://tinyurl.com/ydusavbm
[2] Quoted in: “Application of the Convention of the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide in the Gaza Strip,”
International Court of Justice, 26/1/2024, p. 17, accessed on 29/10/2024, at:
https://tinyurl.com/mr3x4kdr
[3] “Humanitarian Situation Update #226 | Gaza Strip,”
OCHA, 4/10/2024, accessed on 29/10/2024, at:
https://tinyurl.com/yrkwy5ar
