by YUMNA ZAHID ALI
Gaza conflict didn’t start in 2023; it is rooted in 75 years of dispossession, occupation, systemic blockade
The war did not begin on October 7, 2023, no matter how loudly that date is repeated to erase the long history of occupation and conflict that came before it. October 7 is used as a licence to forget, a convenient starting line that allows seventy-five years of dispossession, occupation, siege and repeated military assaults to be reduced to historical ash.
But the testimonies of the oppressed do not work that way. Wars do not begin when the powerful decide to start counting; they begin when people are uprooted from their land, dignity, safety and any right to futurity, and Gaza’s story begins in 1948, not in 2023.
In 1948, during what Palestinians call Al-Nakba, or ‘The Catastrophe’, the creation of the State of Israel came with the forced displacement of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral land. Entire villages were cleared, homes demolished or seized, and families sent into exile under the illusion that it was only for a short time.
It was not. Those refugees were never allowed to return, and Gaza became one of the places where their descendants were compressed into a narrow strip of land where loss was perpetuated, not remembered. When Gaza is bombed today, it is not just a city under fire; it is a refugee camp built on an unresolved crime.
In 1967, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip following the Six-Day War, placing its population under military rule and control. From that moment forward, Gaza’s residents did not control their borders, their airspace, or their freedom of movement. Daily life was regulated by an occupying power that could decide who travelled, who entered, who passed through a checkpoint, who received medicine, and who would have their name crossed out. This was not a temporary emergency measure; it was the normalisation of domination, and it hardened a sense of injustice, not because Palestinians rejected peace, but because they were never offered freedom.
By 1987, that pressure escalated into the First Intifada, a mass uprising driven largely by civilians who used protests, strikes and civil disobedience to confront decades of occupation. It was not an armed invasion but a civilian-led revolt born from humiliation and dehumanisation, and it was met with ferocious military force, mass arrests, beatings and live ammunition. This was the state screaming its only truth: “We have the guns. Your justice is a fantasy. Obey.”
The 1990s brought the Oslo Accords, which were sold to the world as a peace process but felt to many Palestinians like an agreement to keep talking about – an agreement that would never come. While a Palestinian Authority was created, real sovereignty never followed, and Israel retained decisive control over borders, armed enforcement and colonisation. Settlement expansion continued in the West Bank, occupation remained intact, and Gaza was targeted for further degradation. What was presented as a diplomatic solution over time revealed itself as management of the conflict rather than its resolution, breeding disillusionment instead of reconciliation.
In 2005, Israel announced its unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza, withdrawing settlers and soldiers from inside the strip while keeping its chokehold over its airspace, territorial waters, population registry and all land crossings. Gaza was not freed; it was sealed. Its people could not move, trade or rebuild freely, and the territory became dependent on an occupying power that claimed it was no longer responsible while still maintaining a remote-controlled siege. This contradiction was the catalyst for what followed.
When Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006, Gaza was placed under a strangling blockade by Israel, with Egypt’s cooperation and Western backing. This was not a counterterrorism operation; it was collective punishment imposed on over two million people, most of them civilians, many of them children still in diapers. The blockade crippled Gaza’s economy, restricted food, medicine, fuel and construction materials, and trapped every last soul in a sealed enclosure. Despair deepened, and the world largely accepted it as necessary.
What followed were repeated military assaults that reinforced the reality of Gaza as a place where civilian life was expendable. In 2008-2009, Operation Cast Lead killed around 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, while Israel lost 13 people, several from friendly fire. In 2012, Operation Pillar of Defence left 167 Palestinians dead in just eight days.
In 2014, Operation Protective Edge devastated Gaza over 51 days, killing more than 2,200 Palestinians, over 500 of them children, and flattening densely populated city quarters while Gaza remained shrink-wrapped and unable to shelter its people. Each assault cycled back to the same four words: ceasefire, rubble, blockade, trauma.
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