The 2014 Gaza War, also known as Operation Protective Edge (, ), and Battle of the Withered Grain (), was a military operation launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory governed by Hamas since 2007 and which was occupied by Israel since 1967 until its disengagement in 2005.Though Hamas governs the Gaza Strip, the majority of the international community (including the UN General Assembly, the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, the International Criminal Court, and many human rights organizations) consider Israel to be occupying Gaza, as it controls the region's airspace, coastline and most of its borders. Following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Palestinian militants, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initiated Operation Brother's Keeper, in which it killed 10 Palestinians, injured 130 and imprisoned more than 600.Jack Khoury, Hamas claims responsibility for three Israeli teens' kidnapping and murder' , Haaretz, 21 August 2014.'Mashal: Hamas was behind murder of three Israeli teens' , Ynet, 22 August 2014. Hamas reportedly did not retaliate but resumed rocket attacks on Israel more than two weeks later, following the killing of one of its militants by an Israeli airstrike on 29 June. This escalation triggered a seven-week-long conflict between the two sides, one of the deadliest outbreaks of open conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in decades. The war resulted in over two thousand deaths, the vast majority of which were Gazan Palestinian civilians. This includes a total of six Israeli civilians who were killed as a result of the conflict.
The Israeli military operation aimed to stop rocket fire into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Conversely, Hamas' attacks aimed to bring international pressure onto Israel with the strategic goal of forcing the latter to lift the naval and air blockade of the Gaza Strip; among its other goals were to end Israel's attacks on Palestinians, obtain a third party to monitor and guarantee compliance with a ceasefire, release Palestinian political prisoners and overcome its isolation.'Hamas and Israel cling to their war aims,' Deutsche Welle 23 July 2014. According to the BBC, Israel launched airstrikes on the Gaza Strip in retaliation to the rocket attacks by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other Palestinian militant groups.'Hamas 'ready for Gaza ceasefire' if Israeli raids stop,' BBC News 4 July 2014.
On 7 July, after seven Hamas militants died in a tunnel explosion in Khan Yunis that was caused either by an Israeli airstrike (per Hamas, Nathan Thrall, BBC, and a senior IDF official) or an accidental explosion of their own munitions (per the IDF), Hamas assumed responsibility for rockets fired into Israel, and subsequently launched 40 more rockets towards Israel.Christa Case Bryant, 'Ending détente, Hamas takes responsibility for today's spike in rocket fire (+video)' , The Christian Science Monitor, 7 July 2014: "After days of steadily increasing strikes, Hamas militants in Gaza launched at least 40 rockets tonight alone in what appears to be a decision to escalate the conflict. The dramatic spike in rocket attacks is likely to put significant pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to heed calls for an all-out offensive against the Islamist movement, which Israel and the US consider a terrorist organization. While there has been intermittent rocket fire from Gaza since the cease-fire that ended the November 2012 Pillar of Defense conflict, Israel has credited Hamas with largely doing its best to keep the various militant factions in line. Today, however, Hamas took direct responsibility for the fire for the first time, sending a barrage of dozens of rockets into Israel in the worst day of such violence in two years." The Israeli aerial operation officially began the following day, and on 17 July, it was expanded to include a full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip with the stated aim of destroying Gaza's tunnel system; the Israeli ground invasion ended on 5 August. On 26 August, an open-ended ceasefire was announced. By this time, the IDF reported that Hamas, PIJ, and other Palestinian militant groups had fired 4,564 rockets and mortars into Israel, with over 735 projectiles having been intercepted mid-flight and shot down by Israel's Iron Dome. Most Gazan mortar and rocket fire was inaccurate, and consequently hit open land; more than 280 projectiles had landed within the Gaza Strip, and 224 had struck residential areas. Palestinian rocketry also killed 13 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, 11 of them children.'Palestinian armed groups killed civilians on both sides in attacks amounting to war crimes,' Amnesty International 26 March 2015'Unlawful and deadly Rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian armed groups during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict,' Amnesty International, 26 March 2015. The IDF attacked 5,263 targets in the Gaza Strip; at least 34 known tunnels were destroyed and two-thirds of Hamas's 10,000-rocket arsenal was either used up or destroyed.
Between 2,125Annex: Palestinian Fatality Figures in the 2014 Gaza Conflict from report The 2014 Gaza Conflict: Factual and Legal Aspects , Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 14 June 2015 and 2,310 Gazans were killed during the conflict while between 10,626 and 10,895 were wounded (including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were left permanently disabled).Operation Protective Edge: A war waged on Gaza's children, Defence for Children International-Palestine, Ramallah, 16 April 2015. Gazan civilian casualty estimates range between 70 percent by the Gaza Health Ministry, 65 percent by the United Nations' (UN) Protection Cluster by OCHA (based in part on Gaza Health Ministry reports), and 36 percent by Israeli officials. The UN estimated that more than 7,000 homes for 10,000 families were razed, together with an additional 89,000 homes damaged, of which roughly 10,000 were severely affected by the bombing.'UN doubles estimate of destroyed Gaza homes,' Ynet 19 December 2015. Rebuilding costs were calculated to run from over the course of 20 years.'Housing group: 20 years to rebuild Gaza after fighting with Israel' Haaretz 30 August 2014. 67 Israeli soldiers, 5 Israeli civilians (including one child)Israeli child 'killed by rocket fired from Gaza', BBC and one Thai civilian were killed while 469 Israeli soldiers and 261 Israeli civilians were injured. On the Israeli side, the economic impact of the operation is estimated to have had an impact of (approximately ) and a GDP loss of 0.4 percent.
Background
In 2005, following the conclusion of the Second Intifada, Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip, which it had previously occupied since 1967. The unilateral withdrawal plan began in August 2005 and was completed in September 2005.'The Guardian view on the causes of the fighting in Gaza' , The Guardian, 25 July 2014. Nonetheless, the ICRC, the UN and various human rights organizations consider Israel still to be the de facto occupying power due to its control of Gaza's borders, air space and territorial waters. page 16
In 2006, Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian legislative elections. This outcome surprised Israel and the United States who had anticipated the return of the Fatah opposition to power and, together with the Quartet, they demanded Hamas accept all previous agreements, recognize Israel's right to exist, and renounce violence. When Hamas refused, stating that the demand left it "handcuffed", Israel cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority. In mid-2006, an Israeli soldier was captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid. The United States and Israel, in response to Fatah moves in October 2006 to form a unity government with Hamas, tried to undo the elections by arming and training Fatah to overthrow Hamas in Gaza.Nathan Thrall,'Our Man in Palestine,' The New York Review of Books, 14 October 2010: 'Dayton, meanwhile, was overseeing the recruitment, training, and equipping of Abbas's rapidly expanding security forces. Khaled Meshaal, chief of Hamas's politburo, delivered a fiery speech denouncing "the security coup" as a "conspiracy" supported by "the Zionists and the Americans"—charges Fatah denied. In February 2007, on the brink of civil war, Fatah and Hamas leaders traveled to Mecca, where they agreed to form a national unity government, a deal the US opposed because it preferred that Fatah continue to isolate Hamas. Fayyad became finance minister in the new government, despite, he says, American pressure not to join. The Peruvian diplomat Alvaro de Soto, former UN envoy to the Quartet, wrote in a confidential "End of Mission Report" that the violence between Hamas and Fatah could have been avoided had the US not strongly opposed Palestinian reconciliation. "The US", he wrote, "clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fateh and Hamas."' In June 2007, Hamas took complete power of Gaza by force.
Israel then defined Gaza as a "hostile territory" forming no part of a sovereign state and put Gaza under a comprehensive economic and political blockade,Elizabeth Spelman, 'The Legality of the Israeli Naval Blockade of the Gaza Strip' , Web Journal of Current Legal Issues, Vol 19, No 1, 2013 which also denied access to a third of its arable land and 85% of its fishing areas. It has led to considerable economic damage and humanitarian problems in Gaza. The overwhelming consensus of international institutions is that the blockade is a form of collective punishment and illegal.* "UN independent panel rules Israel blockade of Gaza illegal ", Haaretz (story by Reuters), 13 September 2011.
Israel maintains that the blockade is legal and necessary to limit Palestinian rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip on its cities and to prevent Hamas from obtaining other weapons."Position paper on the naval blockade on Gaza." 8 September 2010. Israel carried out Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 with the stated aim of stopping rocket attacks from Hamas militants. The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict concluded that the operation was "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability". page 408 The Israeli government's analysis concludes that the report perverts international law to serve a political agenda and sends a "legally unfounded message to states everywhere confronting terrorism that international law has no effective response to offer them".Initial Response to Report of the Fact Finding Mission on Gaza , Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; accessed 22 November 2014.
First Hamas–Fatah reconciliation (2011) Influenced in the Arab Spring and by demonstrations in Ramallah and Gaza, the gap between Hamas and Fatah was bridged in 2011. After the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared his willingness to travel to Gaza and sign an agreement, the IDF killed two Hamas activists in Gaza; the IDF stated the killings were in response to the launching of a single Qassam rocket, which hit no one, but Yedioth Ahronoth's Alex Fishman argued they were a "premeditated escalation" by Israel. In an interview with CNN, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the reconciliation talks were calls for Israel's destruction, and strongly opposed the idea of a unity government.
November 2012 ceasefire and its violations