Israel–Gaza

On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers broke through the Gaza border fence at dozens of points and carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, many at a music festival and in kibbutzim, and taking roughly 250 hostage into Gaza. Israel's response — a sustained military operation that had by 2026 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 attack came as US-brokered Saudi–Israeli normalization talks threatened to leave Palestinian statehood outside the bargain; whatever the planners' full calculations, it forced the conflict back onto the global agenda. It achieved that narrower strategic effect at a moral and human cost that will be debated for generations. The war widened into Hezbollah engagement, Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, and direct Iranian–Israeli strikes; Syria's own civil war produced another rupture when the Assad regime fell. Together these upheavals 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.