In October 332BC, a city on the rim of the Mediterranean was under siege. This city, Gaza, was the final stronghold standing between the army of Alexander the Great and entry into Egypt.
During that siege, Gaza fell. Alexander captured the Gazan leader, Batis, forced a rope through a gash in his ankles and dragged the body behind his chariot beneath the city walls until Batis died — in imitation of Achilles’s mutilation of Hector’s corpse outside Troy in Homer’s Iliad.
Two millennia on, a different siege is under way. Inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, encompassing the city of Gaza and smaller towns to the south, are no strangers to violence and sorrow. But this month’s retaliatory bombing raids, after Hamas’s terrorist attacks in Israel, have been their bloodiest encounter in years.
By Friday, the Gazan health ministry, which is run by Hamas, said that 3,785 people had been killed in the strip, including 1,524 children.
The strip, one of the most densely populated places on the planet, came into existence with its current boundaries in 1949. Even in a region riven by violence and bloodshed, Gaza has a uniquely anguished status. But how did it become the place it is today?
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Antiquity
Gaza City is one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns on earth. Its first mention, as “Azzatu”, was in a cuneiform missive nudged with a reed into clay about 1,335BC, probably before the earliest songs of the Old Testament were written down.
Located on the ancient Via Maris or “Way of the Sea” trade route that linked Egypt with the northern empires of Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia, it was of strategic significance for centuries. Gaza has long, sandy beaches and rich fishing waters but its position as a trading post has made it an age-old target for invaders.
Gaza was part of the five-city kingdom or “pentapolis” of the Philistines, maritime settlers from the Aegean who mixed with the local Canaanite population, who lived in the region alongside the ancient Israelites and gave their name to the later Roman province of Palestine, and today’s Palestinians.
Everyone from the Israelites to the Assyrians, Arab Muslims, Ottomans and British have taken Gaza City by force at some point in the past four millennia.
During the time of the British mandate, in the 1920s and 1930s, life in Gaza was not dissimilar to how it had been for centuries — home to about 80,000 native Gazans who were led by a small elite of landowning families, made rich by the trade of citrus fruits grown in thick groves overlooking the sea.
1947
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Everything changed in 1948. Under the British Mandate in Palestine Jewish immigration had soared in the preceding decades, and violence between Arab and Jewish communities made the region increasingly ungovernable for a British Empire that was on the retreat.
Seeking a solution to competing national claims from Arab and Jew, and a refuge for Jews decimated by the Holocaust, the UN voted in 1947 for a partition plan in which an L-shaped section, stretching down and inland from today’s Gaza, was allocated to a proposed Arab state. But war broke out in May 1948, when David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, proclaimed a new Jewish state and five Arab armies responded by invading the territory of the former mandate.
This war, in which Israel prevailed, is referred to as the Nakba or “catastrophe” by Palestinians. It was in many ways year zero for the modern Gaza Strip, and many of its problems.
More than 700,000 Palestinian were displaced by the fighting and at least 200,000 of them, mainly from coastal towns, fled south towards Gaza.
Of the 2.1 million people in Gaza today, 1.7 million are classified as refugees, according to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), largely descendants of those displaced in 1948.
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This event is mourned by Palestinians to this day. “The ripples of the disaster in 1948 that hit my parents first spread to us and to our children long afterwards,” wrote Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian-born academic, whose family hailed from east Jerusalem.
By the 1949 armistice between Israel and its enemies, the towns of the newly formed Gaza Strip were occupied by the Egyptian army and the area was dotted with crowded refugee camps. Gazans were severed from much of their traditional farming land by a new border with Israel.
Refugees
King Farouk of Egypt, distrustful of the Palestinians, installed a military government in the strip and appointed Egyptian officials to run all public services and courts. In 1956, Israel, followed by Britain and France, briefly invaded as part of an ill-fated attempt to regain the Suez canal from Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president at the time.
Under the Egyptian-led administration, the economy largely stagnated in Gaza: its primary trade route involved goods smuggled by Bedouin across the Sinai Desert.
The strip was also cut off from the more major historic centres of Palestinian cultural life in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, occupied at the time by the kingdom of Jordan. In 1967 a new occupation began. As part of a lightning offensive during the Six Day War, which took the Egyptian army by surprise, Israeli forces occupied Gaza.
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Yet Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister at the time, immediately recognised that the victory would be a mixed blessing. He took to making a Churchillian V for victory sign with his fingers on outings.
His wife, Miriam, eventually asked: “Eshkol, what are you doing? Have you gone mad?” He replied: “No this is not a V sign in English. It is a V sign in Yiddish! Vi Krishen Aroys?” meaning: “How do we get out of this?”
Israel now had thousands of square miles of territory, but with it came the responsibility of administering areas lived in by Palestinians largely hostile to its existence.
The early days of Israel’s occupation of Gaza saw several attempts at encouraging Palestinians to leave the strip, often with a small financial incentive to resettle in the West Bank.
Eshkol would allegedly phone his envoy, Ada Sereni, to ask her: “How many Arabs have you driven out today?” Between 1967 and 1968, the strip lost about 25 per cent of its population. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers began to appropriate land in the south of the strip.
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One proposal, the Allon Plan, named after Israeli politician Yigal Allon, was a scheme to share the lands of Gaza and the West Bank with Jordan — with Jewish settlers moving into the south of the strip, to form a buffer zone with Egypt.
Violence was rife in the strip after 1967, with Palestinian militants targeting those that they saw as co-operating with the occupiers or accepting jobs in Israel. In the early 1970s militants started violently targeting Israelis, and the army, with Moshe Dayan as defence minister, responded with force. The brutality of that era is still alive in the memory of many Gazans.
Ariel Sharon, the future Israeli prime minister, was the commander overseeing Israel’s military occupation in Gaza. His forces conducted operations in refugee camps, ticking off names from a list when they killed a suspected terrorist. He ordered citrus farmers to chop off the lower branches of their orchards and groves that were, in Sharon’s words, “very difficult for a squad of soldiers to penetrate, and very easy for a squad of terrorists to hide in”. In the wake of Israel’s crackdown, violence in the strip waned and the economy grew by almost 10 per cent each year between 1967 and 1982.
Israeli settlements
In 1971, the historic Gazan landowning elite, led by a new mayor of Gaza, Rashad al-Shawa, sought to bolster the strip’s economy and was granted more autonomy by the Israeli authorities. But the plan was opposed by Israeli citrus growers, unhappy about competition, and also by Palestinians in the refugee camps who viewed it as collaboration with Israel.
In 1987 an Israeli tank transporter collided with a car carrying Palestinian labourers, returning home from a day’s work in Israel. Four Gazan Palestinians from the Jabaliya refugee camp died instantly. Rumours spread that the driver of the tank transporter had deliberately caused the crash, in response to the killing of an Israeli in Gaza days earlier. This was one of the sparks that led to the first intifada, an uprising against Israeli military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, that lasted almost six years.
That same year, 1987, Hamas, officially the Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded in Gaza City. The group’s 1988 charter vowed to destroy Israel and establish a theocracy in Palestine through jihad.
Israeli leaders continued to view the strip, which has far less biblical significance to Jews than the West Bank, as a headache. In September 1992 the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, said: “I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution must be found.”
A solution appeared possible during peace negotiations brokered by the US, which led to the Oslo Accords of 1993 between Rabin and Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Hamas did not recognise the agreement and viewed it as a great betrayal.
When the next round of peace negotiations in 2000 broke down, the second intifada began, with suicide bombings, protests tearing down a new border fence and the first rocket attacks launched into Israeli territory. Hope of a solution faded.
Gaza today
In 2005, driven by Sharon, the Israeli parliament approved a “unilateral withdrawal” plan to disengage from Gaza, and 9,000 Israeli settlers, mainly living in Gush Katif, were removed by Israeli troops, which then withdrew from the strip.
The sight of Israeli soldiers forcing Jewish settlers from their homes was a significant break from the past. But to this day, the UN still considers the strip to be occupied. Arguing that its security is paramount, Israel maintains direct control over Gaza’s air and maritime space, six of Gaza’s seven land crossings and the strip’s access to water, telecommunications and electricity.
Advocates of a “two-state solution” have argued that the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip brings some form of final resolution nearer, showing that major territorial compromise is possible.
However, critics of Israel have argued that their policy of hafrada, or separation, is a means of weakening the Palestinian cause. Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s adviser, admitted the withdrawal was also an attempt to freeze the political process: “We taught the world that there is no one to talk to [on the Palestinian side]. And we received a ‘no one to talk to’ certificate … The certificate will be revoked only when this and this happens — when Palestine becomes Finland.”
The situation in the strip has deteriorated in the past 20 years. In 2004 Arafat died, leaving a succession problem for the Palestinian Authority. In June 2007 — amid violence in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah, the successor to the PLO, in which more than 100 were killed — Hamas seized control of the strip. This split the Palestinian leadership, with the West Bank still controlled by Fatah.
Since Hamas took control in Gaza, the security situation has been febrile. Israel and Egypt have effectively blockaded the strip since 2007, leading to significant humanitarian difficulties, a housing shortage and rising unemployment.
The past 15 years have seen Hamas rocket attacks, cross-border fire and conflicts in 2008, 2014 and 2021. These have followed similar patterns: Hamas rocket attacks into Israel, heavy Israeli retaliation, considerable loss of life, primarily on the Palestinian side, huge destruction of property and little change to the status quo.
This month’s incursion by Hamas into southern Israel was of a different magnitude to previous attacks. It is the bloodiest on Israeli territory in living memory, with the elderly, women and children indiscriminately burnt alive, kidnapped and shot.
The Israel defence forces response thus far, a heavy bombing campaign on Gaza, has also caused thousands of civilian deaths, a number that is growing with each day. Israel has its troops massed for a ground invasion and has promised to destroy Hamas.
Gazan civilians have no exit route as the southern border with Egypt remains closed. However bad things have been for Gazans in recent decades, they might be about to get worse.
“I was born in a refugee camp, and so were my parents,” wrote Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet and founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, this month. “We are living right now in a prison cell with no window, with only bomb smoke as our uninvited guest.”
