Reoccupying Gaza

In the early morning hours of March 18, Israel unilaterally broke the cease-fire it had agreed to with Hamas in Gaza two months earlier, launching a crushing aerial campaign across the territory. In less than twenty-four hours, Israeli warplanes killed more than four hundred people and wounded hundreds more.

The assault has continued unabated ever since. On March 31, during the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, Israel issued an evacuation order that covered much of southern Gaza, displacing more than a hundred thousand people, most of whom have been displaced multiple times before; nearly half a million in total have been forced to leave their homes since the end of the cease-fire. On April 3 Israeli airstrikes killed at least a hundred people across the Strip, including at least twenty-seven who had taken shelter at the Dar al-Arqam school in Gaza City. Just days later they killed at least thirty-two. Since the shattering of the cease-fire, according to health officials in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,500 Palestinians.

After Israel blocked the entry of all goods and humanitarian aid early last month, conditions in the territory have again become dire. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to live in tents amid the wreckage of their former homes. Israel’s energy ministry has cut off electricity, disabling one of the southern Strip’s main water desalination plants. The World Food Programme’s twenty-five bakeries, which provide subsidized bread across Gaza, have closedfor lack of fuel and flour. Basic goods, like sugar and eggs, have become exorbitantly expensive.

Médecins Sans Frontières has warned that Gaza’s overcrowded hospitals—almost all of which have been damaged by Israeli strikes and shelling—are running out of anesthetics, antibiotics, and blood for transfusions. “We treat patients on the floor, without electricity, without anesthesia. We use our bare hands and flashlights,” a Gazan physician told +972 Magazine.  “As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said in early April. “Gaza is a killing field.”

Throughout the Strip, Israeli ground troops have also begun to maneuver, taking up old positions and establishing new ones they may well hold indefinitely. The 2005 unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza is being undone. The next stage in Israel’s destruction of the territory appears to be what many on the country’s hardline right have long urged: a reversion to the pre-disengagement paradigm of direct occupation and siege.