Israel-Hamas war: 7 big questions to understand the worst conflict in decades

Israel and Hamas are concerned in their worst outbreak of violence in decades, one which has already claimed over 2,000 lives, and certain will declare many extra.

The armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas launched an enormous, advanced, and well-coordinated assault on Israel early Saturday from the territory it controls in Gaza. Militants killed over 1,200 folks, together with 11 US residents, kidnapped civilians and reportedly troopers, and fired rockets on Israeli civilians.

It was the most devastating and brutal assault Israel had suffered in decades; Israeli officials described it as their country’s 9/11. The horror of the assault has solely grow to be clearer in the days since. In response, the nation formally declared conflict towards Hamas on Sunday. The declaration comes after the Biden administration’s promise of extra help for Israel and the introduced motion of a number of US warships and plane squadrons into the Eastern Mediterranean. Several nations, together with Egypt and Jordan, have volunteered to attempt to defuse the state of affairs diplomatically.

Israel additionally introduced a siege towards Gaza Monday after a barrage of airstrikes towards the territory beginning Saturday that has already killed over 1,100 folks there, in accordance to native authorities. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres denounced the siege in a Monday briefing, saying, “The humanitarian situation in Gaza was extremely dire before these hostilities; now it will only deteriorate exponentially.”

There had been components that possible contributed to this outbreak of violence — months of simmering conflict in Jerusalem and the West Bank over elevated Israeli settlements, a far-right Israeli authorities that has been conducting a de facto annexation of the West Bank, and Israeli-Saudi negotiations about normalizing relations — however it is usually a conflict decades in the making.

Most Gazans are both refugees from the 1948 Nakba, when mass numbers of Palestinians had been displaced throughout the Arab-Israeli War, or descendants of these refugees, mentioned Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They’ve lived beneath a strict blockade by Israel and Egypt since Hamas assumed management of the Gaza Strip in 2007, counting on international support to entry fundamental requirements. About one-third of Gazans stay in excessive poverty, in accordance to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

The worldwide neighborhood has largely deserted efforts to discover a political answer to this disaster. Now there’s possible to be a protracted, bloody battle inflicting important deaths on either side, with Palestinians set to bear the brunt of the casualties and destruction going ahead.

1. Where does the conflict at present stand?

The Israeli navy mentioned Tuesday it had retaken and secured the border with Gaza; its retaliation towards Hamas and bombardment of Gaza has ramped up.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant introduced Monday a siege on Gaza, on prime of the blockade that Egypt and Israel enacted on the area 16 years in the past after Hamas took energy. So far, entry to electrical energy, gas, and meals has been lower off to Gaza throughout the siege.

The subsequent part of the conflict may embody a floor invasion of Gaza; greater than 360,000 reservists have been referred to as up, a report quantity. Such an invasion can be extremely fraught for the Israeli Defense Forces, which may have to deal with chaotic preventing on Gaza’s dense streets. Netanyahu has been reluctant to put boots on the floor in Gaza since Israel formally withdrew troops in 2005 after 38 years of occupation.

But now, given political pressures — not to point out the undeniable fact that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants are holding Israeli civilian and navy hostages inside Gaza — a floor invasion is definitely attainable.

“We have to go in,” Netanyahu reportedly advised US President Joe Biden Sunday, in accordance to Axios’s Barak Ravid.

It’s not but clear how these choices may be affected by the emergency “unity government” Netanyahu fashioned with an opposition social gathering Wednesday that can cut back the affect of some far-right members of Netanyahu’s authorities and create a small conflict cupboard to oversee the conflict.

In addition to these killed to date, hundreds of Israelis have been wounded. More than 100 are at present being held hostage, Guterres mentioned in a information briefing Monday, and Hamas officers have threatened to execute one civilian captive every time IDF strikes hit a civilian goal in Gaza with out prior warning.

Palestinian casualties are additionally excessive, as Israel bombards the densely populated strip. Thus far, over 5,000 Gazans have been injured in the airstrikes and greater than 1,100 have been killed, in accordance to native authorities; the UN counts ladies and youngsters amongst the useless. On Tuesday, the IDF mentioned it had killed 1,500 Hamas militants in preventing; it was not instantly clear what number of of these casualties overlap with beforehand reported figures from Palestinian authorities. Some 175,000 individuals are sheltering in amenities run by UNRWA, the UN company that assists Palestinian refugees; two of these amenities have been hit throughout the bombardment.

“Hospitals are overcrowded with injured people, there is a shortage of drugs and [medical supplies], and a shortage of fuel for generators,” Ayman Al-Djaroucha, MSF deputy coordinator in Gaza, mentioned Sunday. Ambulances are additionally unable to run, in accordance to MSF employees, as they’re being hit in airstrikes.

There are additionally reported clashes between Palestinian militias and Israeli security forces in the West Bank.

—Ellen Ioanes

2. What do I want to understand about Gaza and Israel’s relationship to understand at present?

Palestinians residing in Gaza and Israelis have at all times been deeply related.

With Israel’s victory in the 1967 War, it conquered Gaza and have become an occupying energy overseeing the Palestinians residing there. (Egypt had managed the territory from 1948 to 1967.) Israel had not at all times so severely fenced off Gaza from the remainder of the world or blockaded flows in and out of it. For a number of decades, Palestinians from Gaza labored in the Israeli economic system. Starting in 1970, Israel established settlements in the territory and navy installations. Israel restricted most Palestinians’ motion in and out of Gaza from the onset of the Second Intifada, or rebellion, in 2000.

Israel withdrew its safety forces and settlements from Gaza in 2005, however the territory nonetheless has remained successfully beneath Israeli occupation. Hamas gained legislative elections in 2006, and amid a violent break up with the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, the Islamist motion assumed management of the territory the subsequent 12 months. Israel has blockaded the territory since. The greater than 2 million folks in Gaza stay in what human rights teams have referred to as an “open-air prison.” The territory’s airspace, borders, and sea are beneath Israeli management, and neighboring Egypt to the south has additionally imposed extreme restrictions on motion.

The United Nations describes the occupied territory as a “chronic humanitarian crisis.”

“This pressure being put on Palestinians — it just assumes that they’re insignificant and they will tolerate any degree of humiliation, and that’s just not true,” Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University historian, says.

Israel has launched intense navy operations on the densely populated territory many occasions over the previous decade and a half in response to rocket assaults from Palestinian militants. The Israeli navy has referred to as it “mowing the grass”: a tactic of conducting semi-regular assaults on alleged terrorist cells to take out leaders and new militant teams, which additionally kill noncombatants and destroy civilian infrastructure in the course of. But mowing the garden virtually by definition doesn’t tackle the root causes of terrorism however solely reduces the stage of Hamas’s violence quickly and perpetuates an escalating cycle of violence. Experts say that there isn’t a navy answer to the political downside posed by Hamas.

Hamas’s wanton violence doesn’t by any means symbolize the views of all Palestinians. A survey of Palestinians from this summer season confirmed that if legislative elections had been held for the first time since 2006, about 44 p.c of Gazan voters would select Hamas. But there was no alternative for elections, and so Palestinians residing in Gaza should endure an unrepresentative authorities that imposes some Islamic tenets, implements repressive insurance policies towards LGBTQ folks, and abusive insurance policies towards detainees.

Even as the state of affairs for Palestinians residing in Gaza has gotten worse in the previous 15 years, much less and fewer consideration from world leaders and US administrations has been paid to it. Yet the explanation for Palestine — to safe an unbiased, sovereign, and viable state — continues to impress grassroots help in the Arab Middle East and the Muslim world.

—Jonathan Guyer

3. But why did Hamas launch such an enormous assault now?

According to Hamas itself, the assault was provoked by current occasions surrounding the Temple Mount, a web site in Jerusalem holy to Jews and Muslims alike. In the previous week, Israeli settlers have been getting into the al-Aqsa Mosque atop the mount and praying, which Hamas termed “desecration” in a press release on their offensive (which they’ve named Operation Al-Aqsa Storm).

It’s implausible, to put it mildly, that Hamas was merely outraged by these occasions and is performing accordingly. This form of advanced operation had to be months in the making; Hamas sources have confirmed as much to Reuters.

But at the similar time, Hamas’s alternative of casus belli does inform us one thing vital.

Palestinian politics is outlined, in massive half, by how its management responds to Israel’s continued occupation — each its bodily presence in the West Bank and its economically devastating blockade of the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s technique to outcompete its rivals, together with the Fatah faction at present in cost of the West Bank, is to channel Palestinian rage at their struggling: to be the genuine voice of resistance to Israel and the occupation.

And the previous few months have seen loads of outrages, ones much more important than occasions in Jerusalem. Israel’s present hard-right authorities, dominated by factions that oppose a peace settlement with the Palestinians, has been conducting a de facto annexation of the West Bank. It has turned a blind eye to settler violence towards West Bank civilians, together with a February rampage in the city of Huwara.

Israel’s give attention to the West Bank can also have created an operational alternative for Hamas. According to Uzi Ben Yitzhak, a retired Israeli basic, the Israeli authorities has deployed most of the common IDF forces to the West Bank to handle the state of affairs there — leaving solely a skeleton drive at the Gaza border and creating situations the place a Hamas shock assault may succeed.

There are additionally geopolitical issues at work, with some experts arguing this was meant to essentially shift how the world approaches Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Israel is at present in the midst of a US-brokered negotiation to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, a serious follow-up to the Abraham Accord agreements struck with a number of Arab nations throughout the Trump administration. Normalization is extensively seen amongst Palestinians as the Arab world giving up on them, agreeing to deal with Israel like a standard nation whilst the occupation deepens. Hamas may nicely be attempting to torpedo the Saudi deal and even attempting to undo the present Abraham Accords. Indeed, a Hamas spokesperson mentioned that the assault was “a message” to Arab nations, calling on them to lower ties with Israel. (It’s value noting that planning for an assault this advanced very possible started nicely earlier than the Saudi negotiations heated up.)

Together, these are all situations in which it makes extra strategic sense for Hamas to take such an enormous danger.

To be clear: Saying it makes strategic sense for Hamas to interact in atrocities is just not to justify their killing of civilians. There is a distinction between clarification and justification: The reasoning behind Hamas’s assault could also be explicable whilst it’s morally indefensible.

We’ll discover out extra in the coming weeks and months about which, if any, of those situations proved decisive in Hamas’s calculus. But they’re the obligatory background context to even attempt to start making sense of this week’s horrific occasions.

—Zack Beauchamp

4. How did this grow to be an outright conflict, worse than we’ve seen in decades?

Hamas’s assault was well-coordinated, large in scale, included an unprecedented incursion into Israeli territory, and managed to evade the Israeli safety equipment, which is why it was so shocking — and ready to inflict a lot carnage.

“The Israelis pride themselves on having world-class intelligence, with the Mossad, with Shin Bet, with Israeli military intelligence,” Colin Clarke, director of analysis at the Soufan Group, a world intelligence and safety consultancy, advised Vox. “They do — from the most exquisite human sources to the most capable technical intelligence gathering capabilities [including] cyber and signals intelligence.”

As defined above, there are each longstanding and rapid causes a conflict of some type was possible.

“The message has been clear to Palestinians,” Hassan mentioned. “They can’t wait on some Arab savior and they can’t wait on the US government to act as peace broker — that they’re going to have to take matters into their own hands, whatever that looks like.”

But the sheer brutality and devastation has been a shock to Israeli society. Rhetoric from Netanyahu and the IDF has mirrored the “vengeance,” as Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, characterised it, that Israeli society is feeling in the wake of the devastating assault.

“In a way, this is our 9/11,” IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said in a video statement posted to the social network X on Sunday. Videos have circulated displaying useless Israelis, in addition to Israeli civilians being captured by Hamas militants, presumably to be held in Gaza. Though Israeli cities close to the Gaza border are actually largely beneath IDF management, the full understanding of the horror of the Hamas assault continues to develop, and a minimum of 100 Israeli hostages stay in captivity and some are presumed dead. Hamas has threatened to execute captive Israelis if IDF operations strike civilian targets in Gaza with out warning, the Associated Press reviews.

Netanyahu formally declared conflict on Hamas someday after the assault. That conflict effort might be ruled by a small “war management cabinet” composed of Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Benny Gantz, the chief of the opposition National Unity social gathering who joined Netanyahu in an emergency unity authorities Wednesday.

—EI

5. What will declared conflict imply?

No one is aware of how this conflict will play out. But given Israel’s extremely superior navy, its response to the Hamas’s assault might be large and devastating in flip. On Monday, Netanyahu vowed to assault Hamas with a drive “like never before.” That was the similar day Israel mentioned it will place Gaza beneath a “complete siege” and introduced it referred to as up 300,000 navy reservists, a quantity that’s now grown by 60,000. Many analysts count on that Israel will ship in floor troops.

“I ordered a complete siege on Gaza. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” Gallant mentioned on Monday. “As of now, no electricity, no food, no fuel for Gaza.”

Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images

But Gaza has been described as successfully residing beneath siege since 2007, as documented by United Nations consultants, journalists, and human rights researchers.

What will change is the scale of violence: It has already exceeded the most up-to-date extreme conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2021, and is probably going to get a lot worse.

Already, Israel has launched what it describes as one in all its largest aerial bombardments ever on Gaza. After barrages of artillery and rocket fireplace, floor operations to goal Hamas fighters might comply with.

Relations between Israel and Palestinians has at all times been asymmetrical: Israel, an undeclared nuclear energy, has obtained tens of billions of {dollars} of US navy support. This weekend, Hamas ruptured Israeli society with wanton violence and mass killing. But it’s the Israeli state that retains the capability to perpetuate an all-out conflict on the Gaza Strip. Israel has typically responded disproportionately to suicide bombings and rocket assaults from Hamas, partially as a deterrent technique. The consequence, nevertheless, is an depth of violence in an occupied territory the place residents have nowhere to run, and the place civilians are commonly killed in Israel’s assaults on Hamas targets.

—JG

6. How is the US responding?

Biden and Netanyahu’s relationship had grown strained over the Israeli chief’s rightward drift and up to date judicial overhaul — however after the assault, the US is standing firmly behind its closest ally in the Middle East.

“In this moment of tragedy, I want to say to them and to the world and to terrorists everywhere that the United States stands with Israel,” Biden mentioned on Saturday. Tuesday, after his third cellphone name with Netanyahu, he once more denounced the “pure, unadulterated evil” of Hamas’s assault on civilians, and reiterated that there ought to “be no doubt: The United States has Israel’s back.”

The US has pledged to ship extra navy materiel, “including munitions,” in accordance to a information launch from the Department of Defense, with the first tranche of safety help already headed to Israel.

In addition to the materials help, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mentioned in Sunday afternoon’s assertion that the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which incorporates an plane service and a number of guided missile destroyers, has been deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean to deter different actors like Iran or Hezbollah. However, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby mentioned in a briefing Monday, “There’s no intention to put US boots on the ground.”

Some human rights and Middle East consultants have criticized US officials for not also prioritizing de-escalation in their public statements, or for not emphasizing the want to keep away from additional civilian casualties, notably given the large civilian casualties Palestinians have endured throughout earlier rounds of violence.

“As we’ve said before, Israel has the right to defend itself and you’re seeing them do that. And in some ways, they’re doing it aggressively, and given the size and scale and the scope of the violence, we understand where that’s coming from,” Kirby mentioned in Monday’s briefing, stating that the US and Israel’s shared values embody “respect for life. The kind of respect that Hamas is clearly not showing at all.”

—EI

7. What does this imply for the area — and world?

One of the largest questions going ahead is whether or not this outbreak of violence attracts in different nations or teams.

The US protection posture, for example, appears to anticipate escalation from Iran and Hezbollah, the Shia militant group primarily based in southern Lebanon. US statements have explicitly warned different nations from “looking at this as a chance to take advantage” of Israel’s vulnerability, Kirby mentioned.

Though there’s hypothesis about Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in the operation, there are not any concrete particulars linking them but. Generally, “Iran has played a major role in helping Hamas with its rocket and missile programs, and mortar programs,” Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, advised Vox. And Iran and Hezbollah additionally present funding, coaching, and intelligence to Hamas fighters, all of which may have contributed to Saturday’s assault, each Byman and Clarke mentioned.

But to date there’s minimal to no corroborated proof linking Iran to this assault. While officers from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah advised the Wall Street Journal that Iran helped plan Saturday’s assault beginning in August and gave the go-ahead for the assault one week in the past, many others have rejected that evaluation. US officers have so far mentioned publicly that they haven’t any indication of Iran’s involvement in the planning of Saturday’s assault, and Israeli officials have said similar things. “This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, advised the Journal. And Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has denied Tehran’s involvement in the operation, per Reuters.

Hezbollah fired rockets and guided missiles into Shebaa Farms, territory Israel captured from Lebanon throughout the 1967 War, Sunday “in solidarity” with the Palestinian folks, Reuters reported. “Our history, our guns, and our rockets are with you,” Hashem Safieddine, a senior Hezbollah official, mentioned at an occasion exterior of Beirut Sunday. The IDF reportedly launched a Patriot missile into Lebanon in response. Rocket fireplace exchanges between the two are ongoing.

Though there’s little indication of a much bigger regional conflagration as of but, it stays a chance that different Arab nations may grow to be concerned — or that efforts to normalize relations between these nations, notably Saudi Arabia, and Israel might be derailed.

There is just one certain factor in this conflict: The struggling will proceed with out important worldwide effort behind a political answer.

—EI

Update, October 11, 4 pm ET: This story, initially revealed October 10, has been up to date with rising data.