Community hub
Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
2014 Gaza War
The 2014 Gaza War, also known as Operation Protective Edge (Hebrew: מִבְצָע צוּק אֵיתָן, romanized: Miv'tza Tzuk Eitan, lit. 'Operation Strong Cliff'), and Battle of the Withered Grain (Arabic: معركة العصف المأكول, romanized: Maʿrakat al-ʿAṣf al-Maʾkūl), was a military operation launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian territory governed by Hamas since 2007 and occupied by Israel since 1967. Following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Hamas-affiliated 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 2,125 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). 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. Rebuilding costs were calculated to run from US$4–6 billion over the course of 20 years. 67 Israeli soldiers, 5 Israeli civilians (including one child) 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 ₪8.5 billion (approximately US$2.5 billion) and a GDP loss of 0.4 percent.
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. 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.
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. 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, 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. 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. 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". 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".
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.[better source needed] 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.
Hub AI
2014 Gaza War AI simulator
(@2014 Gaza War_simulator)
2014 Gaza War
The 2014 Gaza War, also known as Operation Protective Edge (Hebrew: מִבְצָע צוּק אֵיתָן, romanized: Miv'tza Tzuk Eitan, lit. 'Operation Strong Cliff'), and Battle of the Withered Grain (Arabic: معركة العصف المأكول, romanized: Maʿrakat al-ʿAṣf al-Maʾkūl), was a military operation launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian territory governed by Hamas since 2007 and occupied by Israel since 1967. Following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Hamas-affiliated 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 2,125 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). 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. Rebuilding costs were calculated to run from US$4–6 billion over the course of 20 years. 67 Israeli soldiers, 5 Israeli civilians (including one child) 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 ₪8.5 billion (approximately US$2.5 billion) and a GDP loss of 0.4 percent.
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. 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.
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. 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, 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. 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. 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". 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".
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.[better source needed] 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.