Israel and Hamas are involved in their worst outbreak of violence in decades, one that has already claimed over 1,500 lives, and likely will claim many more.
The armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas launched a massive, complex, and well-coordinated attack on Israel early Saturday from the territory it controls in Gaza. Militants killed over 900 people, including 11 US citizens, kidnapped civilians and reportedly soldiers, and fired rockets on Israeli civilians.
It was the most devastating and brutal assault Israel had suffered in decades; Israeli officials described it as their country’s 9/11. In response, the country officially declared war against Hamas on Sunday. The declaration comes after the Biden administration’s promise of additional support for Israel and the announced movement of several US warships and aircraft squadrons into the Eastern Mediterranean. Several countries, including Egypt and Jordan, have volunteered to try to defuse the situation diplomatically.
Israel also announced a siege against Gaza Monday after a barrage of airstrikes against the territory starting Saturday that has already killed about 700 people there, according to local authorities. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres denounced the siege in a Monday briefing, saying, “The humanitarian situation in Gaza was extremely dire before these hostilities; now it will only deteriorate exponentially.”
There were factors that likely contributed to this outbreak of violence — months of simmering conflict in Jerusalem and the West Bank over increased Israeli settlements, a far-right Israeli government that has been conducting a de facto annexation of the West Bank, and Israeli-Saudi negotiations about normalizing relations — but it is also a war decades in the making.
Most Gazans are either refugees from the 1948 Nakba, when mass numbers of Palestinians were displaced during the Arab-Israeli War, or descendants of those refugees, said Zaha Hassan, a…
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