Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, prompting the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) to engage in aerial campaigns and ground operations within the
Gaza Strip. Efforts to free the more than one hundred remaining Israeli and
foreign hostages taken by Hamas have been largely unsuccessful, and their location and
health status are unknown. Almost two million Gazans—more than 85 percent of the
population—have fled their homes since October 2023. Recent casualty estimates from
the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry place the death toll in Gaza at around 42,000,
though such numbers are challenging to verify due to limited international access to the
strip. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is attempting to facilitate
a ceasefire and hostage release deal between the two parties.
The conflict has sparked increased regional tensions across the Middle East. Hezbollah
fighters in Lebanon have engaged in cross-border skirmishes with the IDF, Yemen’s
Houthi rebels have shot missiles at Israel and commercial ships in the Red Sea, and other
Iran-backed groups have launched dozens of attacks on U.S. military positions in Iraq and
Syria. (For more on the direct confrontation between Iran and Israel and the role of the
United States, visit the “Confrontation with Iran” page. For more on the direct
confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel, visit the “Instability in Lebanon” page.)
Background
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. In 1947,
the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, which sought to
divide the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. On May 14, 1948,
the State of Israel was created, sparking the first Arab-Israeli War. The war ended in
1949 with Israel’s victory, but 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and the territory was
divided into 3 parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the
Gaza Strip.
Over the following years, tensions rose in the region, particularly between Israel and
Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Following the 1956 Suez Crisis and Israel’s invasion of the
Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria signed mutual defense pacts in anticipation of a
possible mobilization of Israeli troops. In June 1967, following a series of maneuvers by
Egyptian President Abdel Gamal Nasser, Israel preemptively attacked Egyptian and
Syrian air forces, starting the Six-Day War. After the war, Israel gained territorial control
over the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt; the West Bank and East Jerusalem
from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Six years later, in what is referred to as the Yom Kippur War or the October War, Egypt
and Syria launched a surprise two-front attack on Israel to regain their lost territory; the
conflict did not result in significant gains for Egypt, Israel, or Syria, but Egyptian
President Anwar al-Sadat declared the war a victory for Egypt as it allowed Egypt and
Syria to negotiate over previously ceded territory. Finally, in 1979, following a series of
cease-fires and peace negotiations, representatives from Egypt and Israel signed the Camp
David Accords, a peace treaty that ended the thirty-year conflict between Egypt and
Israel.
Even though the Camp David Accords improved relations between Israel and its
neighbors, the question of Palestinian self-determination and self-governance remained
unresolved. In 1987, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip rose up against the Israeli government in what is known as the first intifada.
The 1993 Oslo I Accords mediated the conflict, setting up a framework for the
Palestinians to govern themselves in the West Bank and Gaza, and enabled mutual
recognition between the newly established Palestinian Authority and Israel’s government.
In 1995, the Oslo II Accords expanded on the first agreement, adding provisions that
mandated the complete withdrawal of Israel from 6 cities and 450 towns in the West
Bank.
In 2000, sparked in part by Palestinian grievances over Israel’s control over the West
Bank, a stagnating peace process, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa mosque—the third holiest site in Islam—in September 2000,
Palestinians launched the second intifada, which would last until 2005. In response, the
Israeli government approved the construction of a barrier wall around the West Bank in
2002, despite opposition from the International Court of Justice and the International
Criminal Court.
Factionalism among the Palestinians flared up when Hamas won the Palestinian
Authority’s parliamentary elections in 2006, deposing longtime majority party Fatah.
This gave Hamas, a political and militant movement inspired by the Palestinian Muslim
Brotherhood, control of the Gaza Strip. Gaza is a small piece of land on the
Mediterranean Sea that borders Egypt to the south and has been under the rule of the
semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority since 1993. The United States and European
Union, among others, did not acknowledge Hamas’ electoral victory, as the group has
been considered a terrorist organization by western governments since the late 1990s.
Following Hamas’ seizure of control, violence broke out between Hamas and Fatah.
Between 2006 and 2011, a series of failed peace talks and deadly confrontations
culminated in an agreement to reconcile. Fatah entered into a unity government with
Hamas in 2014.
In the summer of 2014, clashes in the Palestinian territories precipitated a military
confrontation between the Israeli military and Hamas in which Hamas fired nearly three
thousand rockets at Israel, and Israel retaliated with a major offensive in Gaza. The
skirmish ended in late August 2014 with a cease-fire deal brokered by Egypt, but only
after 73 Israelis and 2,251 Palestinians were killed. After a wave of violence between
Israelis and Palestinians in 2015, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of
Fatah announced that Palestinians would no longer be bound by the territorial divisions
created by the Oslo Accords.
In March of 2018, Israeli troops killed 183 Palestinians and wounded 6,000 others after
some Palestinians stormed the perimeter fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel and
threw rocks during an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Just months later, Hamas
militants fired over one hundred rockets into Israel, and Israel responded with strikes on
more than fifty targets in Gaza during a twenty-four-hour flare-up. The tense political
atmosphere resulted in a return to disunity between Fatah and Hamas, with Mahmoud
Abbas’ Fatah party controlling the Palestinian Authority from the West Bank and
Hamas de facto ruling the Gaza Strip.
The Donald J. Trump administration reversed longstanding U.S. policy
by canceling funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to
Palestinian refugees, and relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The
Trump administration also helped broker the Abraham Accords, under which Bahrain and
the United Arab Emirates normalized relations with Israel, becoming only the third and
fourth countries in the region—following Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994—to do so.
Similar deals followed with Morocco [PDF] and Sudan. Palestinian leader Mahmoud
Abbas of Fatah rejected the accords, as did Hamas.
In early May 2021, after a court ruled in favor of the eviction of several Palestinian
families from East Jerusalem properties, protests erupted, with Israeli
police employing force against demonstrators. After several consecutive days of violence,
Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, and other Palestinian militant
groups launched hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory. Israel responded with artillery
bombardments and airstrikes, killing more than twenty Palestinians and hitting
both military and non-military infrastructure, including residential buildings, media
headquarters, and refugee and healthcare facilities. After eleven days, Israel and Hamas
agreed to a cease-fire, with both sides claiming victory. The fighting killed more than 250
Palestinians and at least 13 Israelis, wounded nearly 2,000 others, and displaced 72,000
Palestinians.
The most far-right and religious government in Israel’s history, led by Benjamin ‘Bibi’
Netanyahu and his Likud party and comprising two ultra-Orthodox parties and three far-
right parties, was inaugurated in late December 2022. The coalition
government prioritized the expansion and development of Israeli settlements in the
occupied West Bank, endorsed discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on religious
grounds, and voted to limit judicial oversight of the government in May 2023 after
a delay due to nationwide protests in March.
Recent Developments
In early October 2023, Hamas fighters fired rockets into Israel and stormed southern
Israeli cities and towns across the border of the Gaza Strip in a surprise
attack, killing more than 1,300 Israelis, injuring 3,300, and taking hundreds of hostages.
One day after the October 7 attack, the Israeli cabinet formally declared war against
Hamas, followed by a directive from the defense minister to the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) to carry out a “complete siege” of Gaza. It is the most significant escalation of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict in several decades.
Israel ordered more than one million Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to evacuate
ahead of a ground invasion that began on October 27th. The ground invasion began in the
north in conjunction with Israel’s continued aerial assault. The first stage of the ground
invasion ended on November 24 with the hostage-for-prisoner swap that also allowed
more aid into Gaza. After seven days, the war resumed—particularly in Khan Younis, the
largest city in southern Gaza that Israel claims is a Hamas stronghold.
Under pressure from its principal ally, the United States, Israel announced it would begin
to withdraw soldiers from the Gaza Strip in January 2024. Since then, military analysts
speculate that the IDF has pulled out at least 90 percent of the troops that were in the
territory a few months ago, leaving one remaining brigade. Israel’s Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, however, is unwavering in his position that an Israeli offensive in
Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip where over one million Palestinians have
taken refuge, is essential to eradicating Hamas.
In mid-March, Israel conducted a two-week raid on al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical
center in Gaza. Israel claimed Hamas was operating out of al-Shifa, and it reportedly
killed 200 fighters and captured an additional 500. The U.S. intelligence community
later determined that Hamas had used al-Shifa as a command center and held some
hostages there, but the Islamist group evacuated the complex days prior to the Israeli
operation. In late April, two mass graves were discovered at al-Shifa and Nasser Hospital
in Khan Younis, another target of an Israeli operation. More than 300 bodies were found
among the two sites; the United Nations has called for an independent investigation.
On April 1, Israel launched an airstrike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus,
Syria, killing multiple senior Iranian military officers. In response, Iran engaged directly
in the war by launching over 300 drones and missiles at Israel on April 13. Though Israel
was able to ward off the attack and only sustained minor damage to an air base, the
escalation marked Iran’s first-ever direct attack on Israel. As Israel weighed an extensive
counterstrike on multiple military targets in Iran, the United States and other
allies advised against actions that they feared would further widen the war. Israel
ultimately launched a more limited aerial strike on military bases in Isfahan and Tabriz
on April 19. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi later downplayed the response, suggesting
Iran aimed to avoid further escalation.
In late July, tensions rose between Israel and Iran-backed proxy groups when a Hezbollah
airstrike killed eleven people in a Druze village in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.
Israel retaliated by assassinating a top Hezbollah leader in Beirut, Lebanon, for which it
claimed responsibility. Hours later, Hamas’ top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was
killed in Tehran while attending the Iranian presidential inauguration. Israel did not claim
responsibility for Haniyeh’s death; however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated
Israel would “exact a very heavy price from any aggression.” As Hamas’ leader in the
negotiations over a ceasefire in Gaza, Haniyeh’s killing further dampened prospects for
regional de-escalation. Iran vowed to retaliate but has delayed its response. A month
later, Israel launched a wave of pre-emptive strikes against a significant rocket and drone
attack by Hezbollah. After exchanging heavy fire, both parties signaled they sought to
reduce tensions.
Gaza is desperately low on water, fuel, and supplies as Hamas has rejected the most
recent cease-fire proposals mediated by the United States and Egypt, while Israel
has limited the amount of aid that can enter. Many humanitarian agencies suspended their
operations after Israel killed seven World Center Kitchen employees in an airstrike. The
World Food Programme warns famine is now imminent in Gaza. Only eleven out of
thirty-five hospitals in the strip remain partially functional due to attacks on medical
infrastructure and a lack of basic supplies. The World Health Organization has warned of
disease spread in addition to mounting civilian casualties.
The displacement of millions more Palestinians presents a challenge for Egypt and
Jordan, which have absorbed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the past but have
resisted accepting anyone during the current war. They fear that Gazans, many of whom
were already displaced from elsewhere in Israel, will not be allowed to return once they
leave. Egypt also fears that Hamas fighters could enter Egypt and trigger a new war in the
Sinai by launching attacks on Israel or destabilizing the authoritarian regime of Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. So far, negotiations have resulted
in only 1,100 people exiting Gaza through the Rafah border crossing to Egypt. The other
1.5 million displaced Gazans—70 percent of the territory’s population—
remained confined to southern Gaza and face increasingly dire living conditions and
security risks.
While the United States said there was “no direct evidence” that Iranian intelligence and
security forces directly helped Hamas plan its October 7 attack, Iran has a well-
established patronage relationship with Hamas and other extremist groups across the
Middle East. Israel has exchanged artillery fire with Iran-backed Hezbollah almost daily
and struck Syrian military targets and airports, prompting concern that the war could
expand north. To the south, Yemen’s Houthi rebels have launched multiple rounds of
missiles at Israel as well. Meanwhile, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, a coalition of
Iranian-backed militias, has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks on U.S. military
targets in Iraq and Syria since the war began.
