On Oct. 7, 2023, the armed Hamas party crossed the border into Israel, attacking thousands of Israelis. Reportedly, 1,300 civilians were killed in the attack, and more than 3,000 were injured. 

That day, the Prime Minister of Israel made a statement.

“We are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens. We have been in this since the early morning hours,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said (translated from Hebrew).

This date was the catalyst for the most current conflict between Israel and Palestine, but it goes by many names. Israel and Hamas. Gaza Strip and Israel. This conflict reflects decades of brewing conflicts. Officially, tensions have been building since the creation of Israel, which was officially recognized as a country by the United States on May 14, 1948,.

The creation of Israel is complex. Before World War I, what we consider Israel now was under Ottoman rule for 400 years. After the empire’s collapse at the war’s end, Britain ruled over the land until the end of World War II. During this rule, the British were granted the Mandate for Palestine in 1922. The purpose of this was “to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine-Eretz Israel (Land of Israel).” At the end of WWII, the United Nations (UN) proposed the creation of Arab and Jewish states in 1947. This brought about the creation of Israel.

However, this did not lead to a 75-year break in tensions between the two countries. Immediately after Israel was proclaimed as a state, Arab nations invaded Israel on November 29, 1948, as they thought that the decision favored Israel because the Arabs had a larger population but a smaller part of the land. An event of note was Israel’s attack on Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, killing about 100 people and destroying the village. A few days later, Arabs attacked Israeli vehicles, killing 75. This marked an escalation in the conflict, which had already been brewing since the Mandate for Palestine. This war also sealed Israel’s independence.

“When you promise two people the same property [it] becomes very impossible. The Palestinians certainly lost land to Israelis. But on the flip side, Jews haven’t had a country they could call a Jewish country since the Roman Empire. And after coming off the Holocaust, they’re like ‘we need to have some place that we can call a homeland,’ but in the process of doing that there are Palestinians who get dislocated off of land that they had, in some cases, for generations,” said Stoughton High School Social Studies Teacher Pat Schneider.

The Suez Crisis happened In 1956. Simplified, it was Israel invading Egypt for a period of time before pulling out again. Then, in 1967, Arabs and Israel had another conflict that was named the “Six Day War.” This got Israel control of the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem, which is a religiously significant place to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is the ancestral homeland of Jews, where Jesus was crucified and resurrected in the Bible, and where Muhammad ascended on his Night Journey. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War took place after Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and Syrians invaded the Golan Heights. This ended with Israel and Egypt formally signing a peace treaty in 1979, though there had been disengagement agreements some five years earlier. 

Three years later, in 1982, Israel bombed Beirut and southern Lebanon due to the attempted assasination of their ambassador in London from a terrorist cell. Those places held several Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) strongholds. They reached Beruit before stalling invasions and began negotiations with the PLO. The conflict “settled” but tensions did not. They spiked again in 2006, when the Hezbollah party (Party of God) killed several Israeli soldiers in an attempt to save Lebanon prisoners.

And then there is Palestine.

“I mean, Palestine doesn’t really exist. I would say it’s an occupied territory,” said Katy Mullen, another social studies teacher at SHS.

Palestine is technically considered an occupied territory of Israel, though it’s been operating under its own governance outside of Israel’s control. Palestine is considered to be the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and some parts of modern-day Israel. The West Bank is under the Palestinian Authority’s control, while the Gaza Strip is under Hamas’ control.

The Gaza Strip had been allotted for Arabs in the original division of Israel and Palestine in 1948. It had been under Egyptian rule from 1949-67, however, Egypt did not recognize the Gaza Strip as a part of Egypt and did not allow the people living there to become citizens of Egypt. Israel had taken control of it in 1957, but pulled out shortly after, leaving Egypt to resume its control. The Six-Day War marked the change in control, as Israel took the area again. 1994 marked Israel shifting power to Gaza and the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas was created near the end of 1987. The organization rejects the country of Israel and wants the “complete liberation of Palestine.”

In an interview with the BBC in 2006 a Hamas leader said, “Don’t be afraid. Hamas is a Palestinian movement, it is an aware and mature movement, one which is politically open in the Palestinian arena, and to its Arab and Islamic hinterland, and similarly open to the international arena.”

It has been recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel. It was elected in 2006 and has been in power of Gaza since. 

And now, in 2023, Israel and Palestine are in conflict again. This leads back to the date of October 7. 

In addition to the number of civilians killed, Hamas took approximately 200 hostages that same day. They fired indiscriminately at populous parts of Israel, injured and brutalized several hundred civilians, and terrorized the population. Among those abducted were people of all ages, health, and backgrounds.

“I think it makes sense that they did it to show the world they’re strong, to scare the crap out of the Israelis, and three, I actually think to a degree, they wanted to provoke the Israelis to invade Gaza, and then to bring them into Gaza and kill a bunch of Israelis and watch a bunch of civilians die so that they could get a lot of support for the Palestinians,” said Schneider.

In response to this, Israel, as previously mentioned, declared war on Hamas. Israel intelligence found that Hamas individuals were hiding among civilians, and they fired upon approximately 1,000 targets that were believed to hold such individuals. These targets included residential areas, mosques, and refugee camps. The Prime Minister of Israel blamed Hamas for using civilians as human shields.

Israel arranged several thousand troops around Gaza while clean water, fuel, and other necessities were running low. During the struggle, 1.6 million Palestinians were displaced.

On Oct. 17, Israel fired on a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine schools where approximately 4,000 Palestinians were sheltering. Six were killed. These strikes continued throughout the month on varying locations. Hamas launched long-range rockets at the north and south parts of Israel. On Oct. 27, connections to communication devices were cut off due to a main communications line being hit by an airstrike. 

On Oct. 10, Egypt closed Rafah crossing from Gaza citizens, and on Oct. 13, Israel urged civilians to move south, but many began to return north because of lacking shelter for the incoming refugees. And again, the Israel Defense Forces once again called for civilians in northern Gaza to move south into a safer area on Oct. 28.

At the end of October, approximately 8,306 Palestinians were killed in Gaza.

On Nov. 1, 300 people were allowed to cross the Rafah border into Egypt. On Nov. 2, a hospital convoy was hit by Israeli strikes along with two other hospitals, which was a result of the Israeli military aiming to hit a Hamas terrorist cell. By Nov. 5, Gaza had been divided into the North and South. Israeli forces invaded a Gazan hospital under the assumption that it was a Hamas Command center and found that Hamas was operating in tunnels underneath the hospital. This caused the residents of the hospital to leave, and aside from one, all hospitals in Gaza shut down due to the lack of resources.

From Nov. 5-13, approximately 200,000 Gazans trekked by foot down to South Gaza. On Nov. 16, communication services broke down again.

November also saw the creation of a seven-day truce on Nov. 24, originally scheduled for only four days, where 102 hostages were released from Hamas, more than 200 Palestinians in Israeli jails were released, and more resources were provided to Gaza. Dec. 2, the truce dissolved. 

The United Nations called for “a humanitarian ceasefire, the protection of civilians, the immediate, unconditional release of all hostages, and humanitarian access.” 153 were in favor, 23 abstained, and 10 countries voted against, which included Israel and the United States. There is no way to enforce this directly. For the time being, it merely represents the global opinion.

 “Let there be no mistake: the United States stands with the State of Israel,” President Joe Biden tweeted on Oct. 7.

This information is current as of Dec. 13.

As of Dec. 12, approximately 1,200 Israelis have been killed, and nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed. These numbers are not exact due to mass graves and several bodies being unable to be transported to morgues, and various sources provide different numbers.