News
By Francesca Rapisarda| Edited by Victoria Brizzi
The Israel-Hamas war and its toll on innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, is an unprecedented conflict and humanitarian crisis raising concerns worldwide. With a long history of complex political, historical, geographical, and religious tension, this ongoing conflict has spurred heated discussions on a global scale. To respect the many viewpoints surrounding this bitterly contested conflict while acknowledging the complexity of the issues at hand, this report attempts to provide fact-checked data and include information on the current Israeli government and Hamas. It is not an up-to-date report, but a summary of the beginning of the conflict to give an overview, even if it does not exhaust the issue. We hope to write further updates in the near future.
It is critical that we handle the material sensitively as we delve into the present-day aspects of this ongoing conflict, taking into account the human cost as well as the significant effects on the people and towns caught in the crossfire. Please be aware that this report contains information on violence, displacement, and fatalities, some of which may be upsetting and triggering to some readers. While interacting with this content, we advise caution and self-care. Our intention is to raise awareness and understanding while providing a basis for well-informed conversations.
Oct. 7
The Islamist militant resistance movement controlling the Gaza Strip, Hamas, carried out a surprise attack on Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip on the day of the Jewish commemoration Simchat Torah (“the joy of Torah” in Hebrew), gunning down 1,400 people, mainly civilians including women, children and babies, and taking more than 240 hostages while leaving 5,600 others injured. More than 40 nationalities are represented among the hostages, along with at least one Israeli-Palestinian citizen. Read more.
Hamas entered Israel by ear, paragliding; by sea, with motorboats; and by land with explosives to enter the border on motorcycles, launching missiles from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory. Part of the attack also took place at an open-air music festival with Israeli and other nationalities represented.
The Israeli government declared war the following day. Previous Israel-Hamas conflicts have occurred in 2021, 2014, 2012 and 2008.
The leader of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif, said that “the assault was in response to Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza; Israeli raids inside West Bank cities over the past year, violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque — built on a contested Jerusalem holy site sacred to Jews as the Temple Mount; increased attacks by settlers on Palestinians; and the expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied lands Palestinians claim for a future state.”
According to military forensic teams in Ramla, Israel, traces of torture and rape were discovered on the victims’ bodies of Hamas raids. Forensic proof, in the form of photos or medical records, has not been shown yet by Israeli military officers in charge of the identification procedure. Hamas has refuted allegations of mistreatment or torture. A senior Israeli officer told a small group of journalists that images of dismembered bodies and beheaded babies exist but would not be shown.
According to the Israeli government, 33 children are claimed to be among the hostages. Around 315 soldiers have been killed.
To date, four hostages have been freed by Hamas: an American Israeli mother and daughter on Oct. 20, and two Israeli women three days later.
Three women held captive are seen sitting down in a video published by Hamas’s armed wing weeks ago, where one of the hostages addresses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “We are facing this situation because of the failure you caused on Oct. 7, you are obliged to release us all. On Oct. 7 there was no [Israeli] army [in response to Hamas’ surprise attack] and no one came to [help] us, you want us all killed. Let us go back to our families. Now. Now. Now.” In response, Netanyahu stated on X it was a “cruel psychological propaganda” by Hamas.
A representative of Hamas’s armed branch, Abu Obeida, asserted that the organization had hidden “dozens of hostages” in “safe places and the tunnels of the resistance.”
In statements that could not be independently verified, Hamas claims that Israeli airstrikes have killed several hostages and that other groups are holding some of the hostages.
Since then, several families of hostages have put pressure on Netanyahu, claiming that his administration is favoring the military campaign over efforts to rescue their loved ones. Since then, representatives of Hamas have declared that they are prepared to free hostages in exchange for both a cease-fire and the release of all Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons.
A 21-year-old woman who disappeared from the music festival was released by Hamas in the middle of October and is seen in a 60-second video getting medical attention for a wound, saying that she is receiving care and that a hospital performed a three-hour operation on her arm.
The Israeli military issued a statement in response to the video, saying that Hamas was “trying to portray itself as a humane organization, while it is a murderous terrorist organization responsible for the murder and abduction of babies, women, children and elderly.”
An 85-year-old Jewish woman was released by Hamas and revealed that after being kidnapped, she went into an underground tunnel where she met with, “people who told us [we] believe in the Quran” and promised “not to harm” her and the other hostages. “I went through hell,” she said. She said she was fed the same meals as Hamas fighters and saw a doctor regularly while she was detained.
“They were very generous to us, very kind. They kept us clean,” Lifshitz said. “They took care of every detail. There are a lot of women, and they know about feminine hygiene, and they took care of everything there.”
Hamas communicated that it was ready to exchange 70 hostages for a 5-day truce on Nov. 13.
Who is Hamas
Hamas is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, (Ḥarakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya). The word Hamas means “zeal.” It was founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian refugee living in Gaza, to defeat Israel’s occupation. The roots of this group link to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was established in Egypt in the 1920s and is one of the most well-known Sunni organizations worldwide.
On Oct. 8, 1997, the U.S. State Department classified Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization. After winning the 2006 legislative elections, Hamas overthrew the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority organization in 2007 and took control of the Gaza Strip. Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’ control, limiting traveler and cargo movement into and out of the territory. Over time, Arab and Muslim nations like Qatar and Turkey have supported Hamas. It has also gotten closer to Iran and its allies recently.
The current leaders of Hamas are Ismail Haniyeh, living in exile in Qatar, and Yahya Sinwar, based in Gaza. The group’s leadership reconnected with Iran and its allies, which included Hezbollah in Lebanon. Many of the group’s leaders have since moved to Beirut.
The military branch of the Palestinian movement Hamas is known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (IQB). Established in 1992, the Qassam Brigades, support Hamas against the Israeli occupation. Its name refers to Syrian independence fighter, Izzedine al-Qassam, who fought against European colonists in the Levant. Al-Qassam took up the cause of the Palestinians and urged armed resistance against Jews and British assets after being driven to Palestine by the French colonialists. The CIA World Factbook states that there are between 20,000 and 25,000 members of the Qassam Brigades.
In 2021, Hamas claimed to have built a tunnel of 500 kilometers (311 miles) beneath Gaza— but its actual existence and extension cannot be verified.
A different resistance liberation movement in Gaza is Al-Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist and social democratic political party founded in 1959 by Yasser Arafat. Following the 1948 Nakba, the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine to establish a modern Israeli state in historic Palestine, Palestinian diaspora citizens launched the secular movement in Kuwait in the late 1950s. The Arabic name for this Palestinian National Liberation Movement is Harakat al-Tahrir al–al-Filistiniya, and its reverse acronym is Fatah, which means “to conquer.”
AlJazeera explains the key differences between Hamas and Fatah.
- Ideology: Hamas is considered Islamist; Fatah is considered secular
- Strategy towards Israel: Hamas seeks an armed resistance; Fatah seeks negotiations
- Objectives: Hamas does not recognize Israel but accepts a Palestinian state according to the 1967 borders (West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza); Fatah recognizes Israel and wants to build a state on the 1967 borders.
The son of a Hamas leader, Mus’ab Hasan Yusuf, is being interviewed by numerous news broadcasts about his 2010 memoir “Son of Hamas,” where he explains what Hamas is according to him: an “idea” more than “an organization.” He refers to Hamas as “worms” that even though they have their heads cut off continue to regrow. They kill the leader and another one will take his place with other millions of people joining the resistance group.
The Centre for Peace and Communication, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, together with The Times of Israel interviewed civilians in Gaza on Jan. 16, “telling authentic stories about common problems that are drastically exacerbated by Hamas’s control.” They released short videos of “ordinary people with expectations and aspirations and dreams…that they are forbidden from realizing.”
It is important to clarify that Hamas does not represent Palestinians. It is a radicalized party and not the voice of all the Palestinian people.
The president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, says that they have long been opposed to Hamas.
“We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion, and international law,” according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa via Reuters.
Abbas attended a peace conference in Cairo to stop the Israel-Gaza conflict from turning into a regional conflict, and Abbas declared that the Palestinian people would not be displaced.
“We warn of the danger of [the] displacement of our civilians from their houses or their displacement from the West Bank or from Jerusalem,” he said. “We will never accept this forcible displacement and will stand tall on our land.”
Israeli government’s response to the attack
Israel’s government vowed to destroy Hamas as a response to the Oct. 7 massacre and kidnapping. In an unprecedented scale, referred to as a second Nakba, it has besieged and bombed Gaza killing around 1 in every 200 civilians of a 2.3 million population as of Nov. 13. A thousand bombs a day for six days, killing more than 4,000 children in a few weeks, according to UN estimates. Human Rights Watch reports that around 5,500 children have been killed. To understand the scale of the death toll on families, figures show that two mothers are killed every hour, and seven women every 2 hours. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reports that 108 of their staff have been killed.
After more than how many days of airstrikes how many hospital hospitals and more recently how many schools,
The death toll of more than 11,100 deaths includes journalists, doctors, humanitarian staff, lawyers, professors, and artists.
While the Israeli government and U.S. President George Biden said he had “no confidence” in the numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry various sources clarify that Gaza’s Health Ministry assigns an identification number to each name as a sign of transparency.
Read What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll? | Read Arab News | PBS | Al Jazeera | AP
Palestinian Ministry of Health- Gaza @mohenglish3. X’s account has been inactive since August 2022.
Netanyahu’s government stopped the supply of food, water, electricity, and fuel into Gaza. Israel claimed that an invasion of Gaza would have been imminent. Israel claims that Hamas hides between the civilians and so they justify their attacks explaining that Hamas is the target.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) says they had warned civilians north of Gaza to evacuate to the south “for your own safety and the safety of your families” as the IDF continues “to operate significantly in Gaza City and make extensive efforts to avoid harming civilians.” After the immediate strikes, however, many civilians were killed while evacuating southwards by Israeli air strikes outside the evacuation zones.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ statement at a Security Council meeting that the fatal Hamas attack on southern Israel “did not happen in a vacuum.” This comment resulted in outraged Israeli authorities. They said that Guterres’ statement equated to a justification for terrorism.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, demanded that Guterres quit, and Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, declared that the UN leader had “failed the test.” In response to the criticism from Israel, Guterres told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York that he was “shocked” by how his council remark had been misinterpreted and that it appeared as though he was endorsing terror attacks by Hamas.
Who is the current Israeli government
Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister for his sixth term on Dec. 29 last year, making him the longest-serving prime minister under the right-wing Likud Party or National Liberal Movement. He served as a premier from 1996 to 1999 with a record 12-year tenure from 2009 to 2021.
Israeli society considers this government to be the most far-right conservative party in the history of Israel, with a form of “religious Zionism” made up of ultranationalist religious factions, and ultraorthodox members in coalition with an anti-LGBTQ radical movement.
The far-right allies of the Religious Zionism ideology movement hold key posts and influence policies toward Palestinians residing in the occupied territories. Originally founded as a secular nationalist ideology, many Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism because they believed it did not follow Jewish law.
The Religious Zionist Party arose as a means of integrating religious Jews into Zionism while separating it from its secular influences. While religious Zionists emphasized the idea that the land of Israel was “promised by God” to the Jewish people, traditional Zionists placed great emphasis on the Jewish people’s nationalist claim to historic Palestine.
Who surrounds Netanyahu? He cooperates with several Israeli far-right personalities in favor of maintaining Israeli rule over the occupied West Bank and they are against Palestinian statehood:
- Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician and lawyer, chairman of the Religious Zionist Party and incoming minister. He has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022. During a cabinet meeting at the Prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on Feb. 23, he said that there is “no such thing” as Palestinian people. He added later “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language,” as reported by the Associated Press.
- Naftali Bennett– the right party leader of The New Right party, the current Israeli army, and the former prime minister, in a recent interview with SKY news, said Palestinians are like “Nazis.” “We are fighting Nazis,” he said. “I’m not gonna feed electricity or water to my enemies.”
- Itamar Ben-Gvir, a former Kach supporter who is now regarded as part of Israel’s terrorist” movement.
- Ben-Gvir, now leading the Jewish Power party, has been given more authority to oversee the security ministry by Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir has a lengthy history of using derogatory language toward Palestinians
Zionism is not Judaism
Jewish Voice for Peace in Washington, D.C. has organized various demonstrations against “Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians.” The protesters, many of whom were wearing shirts bearing the slogan “Not in our name.”
Surrounded by police before the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. while they sat on the congressional building’s lobby floor, they raised a large banner that read “ceasefire.” Some 500 individuals were detained.
Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, an American Haredi Jewish activist, and former spokesperson for the fringe religious group, Neturei Karta, talks to Al Jazeera, highlighting the difference between Judaism and Zionism.
“Judaism is subservience to God, that’s what it’s all about, while Zionism, it’s a transformation to nationalism to have a piece of land,” said Weiss. “It was started by Jews who are non-religious.”
In a video on the page Let the Quran Speak, the host, Dr. Safiyyah Ally interviews Rabbi Weiss: “We hurt, we cry with the Palestinians, we are humiliated because the Zionists took our religion, and they’re using it as a tool to occupy, to intimidate, to silence other people, because if you speak up against them, you’re called anti-Semitic.”
He addresses a crowd in downtown Montreal and says, “The state of Israel does not represent all Jews,” he said. “According to Jewish religion, all of this is criminal.”
On Oct. 15, more than 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies, signed a public statement arguing that Gaza was being subjected to a genocidal siege:
“We note also that the state of Palestine is entitled to initiate, per Article IX of the Genocide Convention, proceedings before the International Court of Justice in order to prevent the perpetration of genocidal acts.”
Scholar Mohsen al Attar writes, “The state of Israel appears to have breached international law, in full public view and frequently with the endorsement of a certain political class and a servile media.”
Raz Segal, an Israeli Holocaust scholar, and expert in modern genocide called Israel’s assault on Gaza in October a textbook case of “intent to commit genocide,” and the rationalization of its violence a “shameful use” of the lessons of the Holocaust.
“What is happening here is the weaponizing the Holocaust,” he said. Israeli’s state exceptionalism and comparisons of its Palestinian victims to Nazis are used to “justify, rationalize, deny, distort, disavow mass violence against Palestinians,” says Segal.
Scholars claim in their public statement that genocide is being incited in Israeli public discourse, and they report the following examples:
Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich called Palestinians “repugnant,” disgusting” and called for “wiping out” the entire Palestinian village of Huwwara in the West Bank.
On national television, security correspondent Alon Ben David relayed the Israeli military’s plan to destroy Gaza City, Jabaliyya, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanun.
Israeli parliament member, Ariel Kallner, called in October for, “One goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.”
Article II of the UN Genocide Prevention states:
- Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
By the definition offered by Britannica, genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race.”
Disagreements exist on the terms “genocide” and “terrorism,” and whether the Israeli government is responsible for genocide or war crimes in Gaza.
Western response
While Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians is an act of terrorism that cannot be justified but only condemned, the United States and the European Union have been criticized for the initial justification and support of Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza’s civilian population and the slow response to a humanitarian crisis.
“Let me be crystal clear, the United States stands with Israel,” Biden said on Oct. 7. “Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop.”
Contrarily, Senator Bernie Sanders immediately condemned the United States government’s support of Israel’s bombardment on Gaza and the Hamas massacre, urging a ceasefire and a humanitarian response.
On Oct. 22, Biden posted on X: “Prime Minister Netanyahu and I have discussed how Israel must operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can. We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace. As hard as it is, we cannot give up on peace. We cannot give up on a two-state solution,” Biden said. “Israel and Palestinians equally deserve to live in safety, dignity, and peace.”
Biden has been sued by Palestinian groups.
After the current death toll, the EU has urged a ceasefire.
Mention the current truce and hostage exchange update.
Gaza reality as of today – displacement
Eyad Al-Bozom, spokesman for the Hamas Interior Ministry asks Arabs from other countries to help Gaza and comments “We tell the people of northern Gaza and from Gaza City, stay put in your homes, and your places. By carrying out massacres against the civilians, the occupation wants to displace us once again from our land,” he told a news conference.
Residents would have nowhere to go even if they decided to leave the area entirely because Cairo opposes their primary route, which would be across Egypt. According to Egyptian security sources, Egypt has discussed arrangements with the US and other countries to send humanitarian aid via its border, but it opposes any effort to create safe routes for people leaving the region.
#ceasefire #bringthemhomenow
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