On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants broke through the Gaza border fence at dozens of points and conducted the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — about 1,200 people killed, many at a music festival and in kibbutzim, and roughly 250 taken hostage into Gaza. Israel's response — a sustained military operation that has, at the time of writing, killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, displaced most of Gaza's 2.2 million people, and produced a humanitarian catastrophe of famine and ruin — has reopened a 75-year-old conflict at a level of intensity and international attention not seen since the wars of the 1970s.
The deeper context goes back at least to 1948 — the founding of Israel, the displacement of about 700,000 Palestinians (the Nakba), and the unresolved question of what kind of state could include or exclude both peoples between the river and the sea. The wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973 hardened the lines; the 1967 conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem began the occupation that still defines the conflict. The Oslo Accords of 1993 attempted a two-state solution; the failure of that process, the assassination of Rabin by an Israeli extremist in 1995, the second intifada (2000–05), Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, the Hamas takeover there in 2007 and the blockade that followed, the successive Israeli operations against it (2008, 2012, 2014, 2021), the relentless expansion of West Bank settlements past 700,000 settlers, and the eclipse of any negotiated path under Netanyahu each contributed to the current configuration. The October 7 attack appears to have been intended, among other things, to force the conflict back onto the global agenda at a moment when normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia under the Abraham Accords framework had been accelerating — a deal that would have sidelined the Palestinians entirely. It succeeded in that strategic goal at a moral and human cost that will be debated for generations. The regional consequences — Hezbollah engagement, Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, Iranian-Israeli direct strikes, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria — are still unfolding and have redrawn the balance of the Middle East, gutting Iran's "axis of resistance" even as the Palestinian question itself remains as intractable as in 1948.
The Israel-Gaza war has reset Western political coalitions on the Middle East, fractured progressive politics in the US and UK over campus protests and party loyalty, accelerated the drift of much of the Global South away from Western moral leadership, and reopened questions about international law — genocide cases at the ICJ, ICC warrants for sitting leaders — that had seemed settled. Whatever its eventual military outcome, it will be one of the defining geopolitical events of the 2020s.