HISTORY OF THE GAZA CONFLICT

History of Gaza Conflict.

this is a work in progress - it will be expanded..

It all started back in 1948 when Gaza’s population more than doubled as Palestinians sought refuge there from Israeli gunmen. Then in 1967 Gaza was occupied by Israeli army – at which point the welfare of the captive population become legally an Israeli responsibility – as it remains to this day.

In 2006 the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Assembly for the West Bank and Gaza strip were convincingly won by Hamas. They win 74 seats against Fatah’s 45 - out of a total of 132 seats. International observers judge the elections fair.

But this democratic result was judged totally unacceptable by Israel, the US and European powers – and from this derives much of the misery of today. The Israeli army launched a savage campaign to prevent Hamas from taking power. Over 30 of the elected Hamas representatives were arrested by Israel and imprisoned – making it impossible for the Palestinian Legislative Assembly to function.

Fatah, despite losing the election, was and still is supported by the West as if it had won this election; while the elected Hamas government has found most of its funding cut off – including tax revenues to which it was legally entitled. These sanctions on Hamas for daring to win were given the outspoken support of Labour Friends of Israel, a UK parliamentary lobbying organization of considerable influence that is now openly supporting the Israeli attack on Gaza.

Israel began to restrict food and medical supplies to Gaza. Students who had won university places in the West were refused permission to take up their places. Women die of birth complications as they are prevented from going to Israeli hospitals by the Israeli forces. Many Palestinians were killed, civilian facilities were destroyed. The gates in the wall Israel built around Gaza were frequently kept closed.  Agricultural output rotted on trucks.  This wrecked the Gaza economy.  80% became unemployed.

At the international level, the United States, the European Union, Canada and Japan suspended financial aid to the Palestinian National Authority, leading to economic hardship and further suffering of Palestinian civilians.
(http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/Reports/English/pdf_annual/Ann-Rep-07-Eng.pdf)

When the Hamas-led government found alternative sources of funding, the US mounted pressure on the international and Arab banks transferring these funds. Consequently in Gaza most civil servants, police, hospital workers, teachers, could not be paid. Development projects funded by international donors, including roads, schools, housing projects and sewage, were completely halted. By 2007 the situation in Gaza was desperate. Sewage started to run in the streets.

Meanwhile in the West Bank, supporters of Fatah carried out a series of retaliatory attacks against members, supporters and institutions of Hamas. They targeted health and cultural associations, charities, press offices, television and radio stations, sports clubs and some local councils, which have been run by Hamas following local elections. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Right’s (PCHR) documentation, at least 50 public and private institutions were attacked; 3 persons, including a child, were killed; and at least 60 persons were kidnapped in the period 13-17 June 2007.

The US funded a program of arming Fatah and 5,000 trained Fatah fighters were sent into Gaza, but a brutal short civil war leads to a Hamas victory in Gaza and a Fatah victory in the West Bank.The Fatah leaders then illegally replaced the elected government on the West Bank. Hamas succeeded in retaining control in Gaza.

On 19 September 2007, Israel declared the Gaza Strip as “a hostile entity,” a prelude for more measures of collective punishment. These crimes have included; willful killings; extra-judicial executions; settlement activities; land confiscations; construction of the Annexation Wall; illegal arrests; and restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians throughout the OPT.

According to PCHR’s documentation, in 2007, IOF carried out 37 extra-judicial execution attacks, in which 68 Palestinians were killed. Many of these murders were carried out in crowded Gaza streets.

The child death toll dropped in the latter part of 2007 but rose dramatically during the first six months of 2008, largely as a result of a large-scale IOF military operation across the Gaza Strip at the end of 9 February 2008 code-named “Operation Winter Heat”, as well as IOF killings of children in the border areas of the Central and Eastern Gaza Strip. PCHR noted with grave concern that IOF killed more children in the Gaza Strip during the first four months of 2008 than during the whole of 2007.

A medical investigation into psychological trauma among Gaza’s children found that 74.5% of the sample tested had witnessed IOF tanks and heavy artillery firing on their homes, and 86.7% had witnessed bombardments of other local homes by airplanes and helicopters. 71.3% of the children had experienced the violent death of a friend. In addition, 75% had witnessed a public assassination carried out by Israeli forces. (PCHR interview with Dr. Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, 7/07/08)

The IOF siege of Gaza, which has steadily tightened since June 2007, has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the Gaza Strip. For example:
• The Gaza Power plant completely stopped operation due to the lack of energy fuel. Over the past three weeks, IOF have allowed only 1,721,610 liters of energy fuel into the Gaza Strip, an amount which can operate the power plant for only 5 days.
• The main concern of 1.5 million people living in the Gaza Strip is to obtain their basic needs of food, medicines, water and electricity supplies.
• The majority of the civilian population lack access to drinking water.

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights asserts, according to its monitoring of the situation on the ground, that the IOF has perpetrated grave breaches of the International Humanitarian Law (IHL), amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity, in the course of its military actions in Gaza. The Center also asserts that the vast majority of IOF's targets in Gaza are civilian targets that must not be deliberately targeted. This includes houses, mosques, police stations and at least one ambulance. Most of the casualties are not combatants and were not involved in any hostilities when they were targeted by IOF.

Despite all this, in early 2008, due to international mediation,  Hamas agreed to a truce for a minimum of six months, including stopping the firing of rockets from the Gaza strip. In return Israel held out that it would ease the siege.  Hamas rigorously policed this truce. Israeli settlers in nearby towns reported that life had nearly returned to normal. They petitioned the Israeli authorities to extend the truce. They set up direct links with dozens of Gaza representatives.

Then in early November Israeli forces mounted a raid on Gaza. Rockets were fired in revenge. But Hamas again offered to renew the truce - but insisted that Israel must end the siege in return.  Israel refused  - for it had its attack now planned. It would destroy Gaza in order to destroy the government it elected, it hated them so much.

The Israelis justified this by speaking of the Hamas charter as filled with hatred, and as calling for the destruction of Israel. There is indeed much that can be criticized in this document, as is also true of some of the documents of the Israeli settlers taking West Bank land  - but this does not excuse the terrible events to which we are witnessing. No matter what this document states, Hamas had offered Israel a long-term truce with no rockets,  but the price they asked for this, the ending of the siege, while reasonable and sensible, was not something the Israel was willing to give and for this demand now the people of Gaza are being slaughtered

TARIQ ALI’S TAKE ON THIS HISTORY.

Tariq Ali reported in the Guardian newspaper in the UK on 30th December 2008 that “the assault on Gaza, planned over six months and executed with perfect timing, was designed largely to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch.
“Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with Obama and Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet. The EU politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians etc (for all the gory detail, see Harvard scholar Sara Roy's chilling essay in the London Review of Books) were convinced that it was the rocket attacks that had "provoked" Israel but called on both sides to end the violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt and Nato's favourite Islamists in Ankara failed to register even a symbolic protest by recalling their ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UN security council to discuss the crisis.
As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will be to inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the ranks of those very organisations that the west claims it is combating in the "war against terror".

“Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. The west and Israel tried everything to secure a Fatah victory: Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the "international community" in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the IDF, their posters confiscated or destroyed, US and EU funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and US congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run.
“Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza – in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer, "the public will then support the Authority against Hamas."
“Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this. Hamas's electoral triumph was treated as an ominous sign of rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures were applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those of the party it had defeated at the polls. Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority's combination of greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their acquiescence in a "peace process" that has brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people.
“It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad base of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran. How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of IDF killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas's unilateral ceasefire, begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer, despite the Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests that followed, in which some 300 Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank.
“On August 19 2003, a self-proclaimed "Hamas" cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in west Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire's negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas, in turn, responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the EU declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization – a longstanding demand of Tel Aviv.
“What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline – demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest-armed oppression of modern history.
"Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for 45 years against occupation force," said General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993. The real grievance of the EU and US against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The west's priority ever since was to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas – as publicly picked for his post by Washington, as was Karzai in Kabul – at the expense of the legislative council is another.
“No serious efforts were made to negotiate with the elected Palestinian leadership. I doubt if Hamas could have been rapidly suborned to western and Israeli interests, but it would not have been unprecedented. Hamas' programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country.”

End