One year of the Gaza war: a chronology

October 7 marked the beginning of a new reality in the Middle East, embroiled in an international conflict with no end in sight.

Oct. 6 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Gaza war between Israel and Hamas that broke out on October 7, 2023 is the latest episode of a historic and quintessential conflict that has known as many scenarios as turning points. In the contemporary era, one of them would begin with the partition plan established by the United Nations in 1947 for the establishment of two states, one Arab and the other Israeli, in coexistence, which with the perspective of time seems more unattainable every day.

One of the most immediate precedents of the war that is currently taking place took place in 2006, the year of the so-called Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip, followed by the subsequent seizure of power the following year by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, an authority undisputed of an enclave blocked by Israeli forces.

Twelve months later, the first armed conflict began in the area under these new conditions; a confrontation that would experience several consequences in the following years, but none remotely similar to the current escalation, due to the number of victims, damages, forced displacements, and due to the extreme polarization of the political leaderships both in the Islamist movement and in the Israeli Government.

On the eve of October 7, the Israeli ultranationalist sector, an essential ally in the Executive of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had its sights set on an operation to cement its control in the West Bank, taking advantage of the vulnerability of a weakened Palestinian Authority, while Hamas finalized its attack against a border lacking the necessary military resources, as the Israeli Army later recognized, to defend the massive incursion that was coming.

OCTOBER 7

At approximately 6:30 a.m. on October 7, Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzeldin al-Qassam Brigades, accompanied by other armed groups and Palestinian civilians launched a “coordinated and complex” attack, according to the subsequent United Nations assessment. and the Israeli Army, against Israeli communities on the border with the Gaza Strip, using as cover the massive launch of 2,200 rockets against Israel.

More than 1,000 Palestinian armed elements of the aforementioned groups proceeded to carry out an indiscriminate massacre in 24 points in southern Israel, mainly against the Beeri kibbutz and Nova music festival. The massacre left more than 1,200 dead, including 809 civilians (at least 280 women and 40 children, according to the subsequent UN report) and 314 soldiers. An approximate total of 14,970 people were injured. At least 252 people were kidnapped.

At around 6:00 p.m., Israel declared a state of war for the first time since the Arab-Israeli war of 1973: the beginning of an unprecedented military operation against the Gaza Strip, with the mobilization of 300,000 reservists. At the same time, on its northern border, the militias of the Lebanese Shiite party Hezbollah finished preparing their incorporation into the conflict.

On the morning of October 8, Hezbollah militias began their rocket attacks against communities in northern Israel, at the beginning of the regionalization of the conflict and the hardening of the strategy of the Israeli Army, which, already engaged on three fronts – – after Yemen’s Houthi insurgency launched its first attack against Israel since the start of the war on October 19 – began its full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip on October 27.

A FAILED TRUCE

The seven-day ceasefire declared on November 24, almost a month after the Israeli invasion, is the only respite the war has known so far. During that week, and thanks to an intense international mediation process, Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 105 civilians kidnapped by Hamas, in what, during the first days, seemed to be a first push towards a halt to the lasting fire, expectations that ended up crumbling.

Israel denounced that Hamas had no intention of freeing all the women and children, while the Islamist movement accused the Israeli Army of constantly violating the rules of the cessation of hostilities and paralyzing foreign aid to the blockaded enclave with the intention of suffocating the population.

The end of the truce meant the intensification of Israeli bombing of the enclave, the acceleration of its ground operations, and the certainty that the consequences of the war were definitively slipping out of the hands of the international community.

COLLAPSE OF HUMANITARIAN LAW IN AN INTERNATIONAL WAR

The subsequent months have been characterized by the existence of two simultaneous cycles of destruction in Gaza and the international inability to stop it.

While the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN court, on January 26 ordered Israel to “take all possible measures” to prevent a genocide in Gaza, the United Nations Security Council had already been trying for months to enact without success a resolution for the ceasefire, in part due to the vetoes of the United States, an ally of Israel, considering its terms an obstacle to negotiations, although it ended up abstaining in a vote on March 25, facilitating the approval of a text that has not been fulfilled until now.

In Gaza, the consequences of the Israeli attacks mark the chronology of events, such as the one that cost the lives of seven employees and collaborators of the NGO World Central Kitchen on April 1, or the bombing on June 8 in Nuseirat; an attack used to protect Israeli soldiers in a hostage rescue operation that left more than 270 Palestinians dead, according to the Hamas government in Gaza.

All of this adds up to 42,000 Palestinian deaths, more than 97,000 injured and hundreds of thousands forcibly displaced by the attacks. In addition, almost a thousand health sector employees, 200 workers from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and more than a hundred journalists have died.

Israel, on the other hand, describes a reality in which Hamas constantly uses civilians as human shields with the connivance of humanitarian agencies while denouncing the passivity of the international community in the face of the hostage situation (six of them found dead on January 1). September, Israel assured, with signs of execution), and the constant danger that threatens its population, surrounded by enemies.

Proof of this took place on April 14 when Iran launched dozens of attack drones and ballistic missiles from its territory in response to the death, two weeks earlier, of elements of its Revolutionary Guard in Damascus (Syria), a precedent for another launch. massive Iranian missile launch on October 1; threats that occur in the midst of Palestinian attacks on the Israeli population, such as the one that left seven dead in Tel Aviv precisely that same day.

This internationalization of the conflict is closely linked to Israel’s parallel operations to decapitate the armed movements it faces. Hamas political leader Ismail Haniye died on July 31. Hezbollah Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah died on September 27. Five days later, on October 1, Israel invaded southern Lebanon and unleashed a wave of bombings on southern Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, with a provisional cost of more than 2,000 dead and almost 9,800 wounded in Lebanese territory, and a new section in a chronology of horror that does not end.