Under occupation, armed resistance will never end
Palestinians ride on a cart as they inspect destroyed buildings on the southern outskirts of Gaza City on 26 November 2023
Tariq Kenney-Shawa writes in Middle East Eye:
On 7 October, the armed wing of Hamas, al-Qassam Brigades, breached the high-tech, militarised barrier that Israel has used to imprison Palestinians in Gaza for more than 16 years.
The armed group overran Israeli defences, ransacked military bases, and briefly seized control of several settlements. Palestinian fighters killed around 1,200 Israelis, including both soldiers and civilians, and took more than 200 hostages back into Gaza.
In the hours and days that followed, Israel’s western allies and leading media organisations were quick to call the attack “unprovoked”, aiming to justify an Israeli response that has already killed more than 15,000 Palestinians across Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The 7 October attack was indeed unprecedented, but to call it “unprovoked” reflects a deliberate attempt to obscure the fact that Israel created the violent conditions that rendered a violent response inevitable.
Today, nearly two months into the Gaza massacre, Israeli forces are killing and maiming yet another generation of Palestinians – and provoking the next cycle of violence.
History did not begin on 7 October. What took place that day followed more than 75 years of Israeli settler-colonialism, and it was triggered by the unbearable conditions in Gaza amid Israel’s 16-year siege and imprisonment of more than two million people in the territory.
Most of Gaza’s residents are the descendants of refugees who were forced to flee their homes across Palestine in 1948 in the face of rampaging Zionist militias. Gaza came under Egyptian control until 1967, when Israel invaded and seized the territory.
The grip of Israeli occupation tightened with each year that followed, isolating Gaza’s inhabitants from the rest of Palestine and the world. In the face of relentless Palestinian resistance, Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, only to impose a suffocating siege that has continued ever since.
Occupation transformed
The truth is, Israel’s occupation of Gaza never ended; it merely transformed. Today, Gaza is often described as the world’s largest open-air prison. But even this description fails to do justice to the extent of Israel’s brutality.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is far worse: it is a project solely dedicated to the collective punishment of an entire population that has dared to resist.
With more than 2.3 million people packed into area of about 365 square kilometres, and enclosed behind a high-security electronic fence and concrete wall, Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth.
Israel’s blockade looms over just about every aspect of life for Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli regime controls who enters and exits the Gaza Strip with an archaic permit system, routinely used as leverage over the entire population.
Surrounded by Israel and Egypt, most Palestinians in Gaza have never been allowed to leave the enclave. Israel even controls its airspace and territorial waters.
The blockade has devastated Gaza’s economy and prompted what the United Nations has termed “de-development” – a situation in which development is not merely impeded, but actively reversed. This has left nearly half of the population unemployed, with the rate exceeding 70 percent among youth.
For many Palestinians in Gaza, life is a struggle for survival. Between 2007 and 2010, Israeli authorities maintained a calorie count of Palestinians’ nutritional requirements to ensure that they only received the bare minimum of food to avoid starvation.
And in just the first six months of 2023, nearly 400 children in Gaza were denied permits to go to the occupied West Bank for urgent healthcare.