The Gaza Strip is a 140-square-mile region of the Occupied Palestinian Territories bordering the Mediterranean. Some 70 percent of its population are refugees or their descendants, half of them children. Understanding something of its recent history is essential to make sense of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israelis committed by Hamas and other militant groups, which included war crimes described by a UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry.  

After Israel took over the Gaza Strip in 1967 it barred exports from Gaza to western markets and forced Gaza’s farmers to apply for permits to replace their old fruit trees or drill wells.  By 1987, 3,000–4,000 Israeli settlers controlled over a quarter of the tiny Gaza Strip, which was one of the most densely populated places on earth. Settlers had taken over its best agricultural land and were using nearly 20 times more water per capita than Palestinians, the majority of whom lived in eight packed refugee camps.  

The Gaza Strip gave birth to the first Palestinian Intifada on December 8, 1987, when an Israeli army vehicle ploughed into a group of Palestinian workers in the Jabalya refugee camp, killing four of them. The unarmed uprising soon spread to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as Palestinian civil society rose up to “shake off” (which is what Intifada means in Arabic) the Israeli occupation. Over 1200 Palestinians were killed and 100,000 imprisoned before the Intifada subsided and the 1993 Oslo “peace process” began.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon removed Israel’s settlers from Gaza in 2005 in order to be able to focus on settlement expansion in the West Bank. The following year the militant group known as Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) won the legislative elections in Palestine, and after a factional skirmish with Fatah took over the government in the Gaza Strip in 2007. Hamas had emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987 and early in the Intifada was supported by Israel as a way of undermining the PLO and Unified Leadership of the Uprising.

Israel then turned the territory into what has been called “the largest open-air prison” in the world.  It tightly controlled everything and everyone that could enter and leave, and even calculated the calories needed to keep the population alive when deciding how much food could be allowed to enter. Its drones kept constant watch on the population and its navy patrolled the coastal waters and routinely fired on Palestinian fishing boats. 

Once the settlers were gone, Israel subjected the Gaza Strip to a series of lethal military offenses that it called “mowing the lawn.” Its attacks of 2008–9, 2012, 2014, 2021, and 2022 killed over 4,000 residents, nearly 900 of them children. Israeli snipers also brutally suppressed the unarmed Great March of Return organized by civil society in 2018–2019, leaving at least 230 people dead and thousands wounded.  

The repeated military offensives severely damaged Gaza’s water, sewage, and electricity infrastructure. Most of the materials needed to repair the damage were classified by Israel as “dual-use items” considered to have military and civilian applications forbidden or restricted entry by Israel. As a result, wastewater treatment plants often could not function, and sewage lakes flooded villages killing people and animals. In 2007, a sewage lake in the northern Gaza Strip drowned five people. By 2017, some 108,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage were being dumped into the Mediterranean every day. That summer a five-year-old died after swimming in the polluted sea.  

The catastrophic water situation was among the factors that led the UN in 2012 to write a report in which it wondered whether the Gaza Strip would be livable in 2020. Gaza relies on the Coastal aquifer for its groundwater. Increased extraction from the aquifer caused by the growth in Gaza’s population and Israel’s deep wells, dams, and boreholes adjacent to Gaza have caused a decline in the level of the aquifer that has allowed sea water to leach in. By 2020 Gaza was getting over 95 percent of its water from the polluted aquifer and extracting three times its sustainable yield. Some 97 percent of that groundwater was unfit to drink due to high sewage and salinity levels.  

Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack has largely destroyed the Gaza Strip and ensured that it will be unlivable for years to come.