Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault and violence. It also contains remarks from Israeli government officials demeaning the Palestinian people.

In an April 12, 2024 article, The Hilltop Monitor implied that acts of sexual violence committed by Hamas towards Israelis on Oct. 7 were called into question. There is substantial evidence, including from a United Nations report, that such acts did occur. It is crucial in journalism to believe victims of sexual violence and assault. The story should have reflected that different government officials and media outlets disagree on reports of weaponized rape.

A corrected version of the story is below:

This is the third article published in The Hilltop Monitor about the Israel-Hamas conflict. See also Alee Dickey’s October 2023 opinion piece on the initial Hamas attacks and the first article in my series on the origins and objectives of the conflict from Feb. 9, 2024.

Conflict Renews

“On the morning of Oct. 7,” Dickey’s article begins, “around 2,200 rockets raced toward southern and central Israel. The rockets targeted sites like the Nova Music Festival where attendees were forcibly taken as hostages; later, at least 260 bodies were discovered.” Since the publication of Dickey’s article, more facts have come to light about the initial attacks from Hamas.

According to Reuters, the initial attacks were multifaceted. Hamas rockets were merely the first strike of several. Two hours later, Hamas militants broke down barriers separating Gaza from southern Israel. The attacks caught several Israeli military bases off-guard in what can only be described as a severe intelligence failure; neither Israeli nor Western intelligence agencies foresaw these attacks.

The results were horrific. Witnesses at the Nova festival, a significant target of Hamas attacks, described rape, mutilation, and murder against civilians.

May Golan, Israel’s Women Empowerment Minister, told the BBC that she “spoke with at least three girls who are now hospitali[zed] for a very hard psychiatric situation because of the rapes they watched. They pretended to be dead and they watched it, and heard everything. And they can’t deal with it.”

It was reported that Hamas had ordered its militants to systematically rape Israeli women and girls. A December 2023 New York Times investigation found that “the attacks against [Israeli] women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” 

Sexual violence did occur on Oct. 7; however, whether such violence was systematic on the part of Hamas is disputed. Independent investigations from the Intercept and Al Jazeera found significant problems with the New York Times investigation’s claims. The Intercept also reports that an episode of The Daily, a podcast created by the New York Times, covering the paper’s investigations failed to pass a fact check, and was not published as a result; Times representatives have denied this claim.

In the days that followed, Hamas claimed direct responsibility for the attacks. In an interview with NPR, senior Hamas official Ali Barakeh stated that the attacks were in response to “Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people in Jerusalem and the West Bank,” asserting that the attacks were retaliatory. The Hamas official did not specify in this interview what crimes he had been referring to, but Israel has committed many crimes in this region.

The Israeli military could not effectively respond to these attacks; military forces were disorganized, so a defensive response was not possible on Oct. 7. A separate New York Times investigation found that the Israeli army “was undermanned, out of position and so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for targeting information.” 

Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general, told that same New York Times investigation that there was no Israeli plan to address a Hamas attack, saying that “the army does not prepare itself for things it thinks are impossible.”

Israel’s subsequent retaliation, on the other hand, was anything but poorly organized.

Lockdown

Almost immediately after Oct. 7, Israel heightened its trade blockade of the Gaza Strip, an area to Israel’s south. Blockades are nothing new for Gaza, as Gaza has been under blockade since 2007. However, the pre-attack blockade still permitted essential services through. Now, the Israeli government denied those essential services access to Gaza. 

Two days after the Oct. 7 invasion, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a total blockade of Gaza. The enhanced blockade represented “a complete siege … no electricity, no water, no food, no fuel.” Gallant added, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

About a week and a half later, on Oct. 21, Israel lifted parts of the blockade, allowing minimal amounts of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza via the Rafah border crossing in Egypt. Even so, Israel’s invasion has been devastating to Gaza’s economy and well-being. Over 30,000 Palestinians have lost their lives, and more Palestinians are being killed by Israel every day. As of the time of writing, this number nears 33,000 people.

According to Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, Palestinian welfare is rapidly diminishing. As of December 2023, 1.9 million people in Gaza are internally displaced. The term “internally displaced person,” according to the UN Commission for Human Rights, refers to any person who is forced to leave their home or residence as a direct result of armed conflict. Such people are often referred to as “refugees.” For reference, the population of Gaza is 2.2 million people: meaning that 85% of Gaza’s population is (or has been) displaced.

This devastation has led Doctors Without Borders’s International Secretary General, Christopher Lockyear, to tell the United Nations Security Council, “[Palestinians are suffering] repeated displacement, constant fear and witnessing family members literally dismembered before their eyes.” Young children, even as young as five, have told Doctors Without Borders that they would “prefer to die [instead of remaining in Gaza].”

Some claim that this blatant disregard for civilian life violates the laws of war. Despite Israel’s loosening of the blockade, around half a million Palestinians in Gaza are starving. Regardless of whether Israel has loosened the blockade, intentional starvation of civilians is forbidden under international law. Israel has been accused of genocidal actions at the International Court of Justice as well.

Conclusions & Series Map

An important takeaway from the above descriptions of the Israel-Hamas conflict is that this war is going to be complicated. Both Hamas and the Israeli government have disrespected the laws of war and each other. We should expect, then, for histories to be clouded, for tensions to be high, conditions for civilians to be brutal, and for overall mistrust and obscuring of a way out. In my next article, I’ll discuss war crimes committed by all sides of this conflict. Later articles will cover what I believe to be the solution.

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of violence and mentions of anti-Semitism.

Origins
This is the second article published in The Monitor about the Israel-Hamas war (2023-present). The first was written by Alee Dickey and is available on The Hilltop Monitor’s website or in last semester’s Issue 7 print edition. Dickey does an excellent job of explaining Israel’s rise to statehood. It does not, however, address the rise of Hamas – the other main agent in this conflict. This article will examine the rise of Hamas and its involvement in Palestine.

Maps are critical to understanding this conflict, and this article would not be complete without one. The Monitor has created such a map for this article. For the cartography connoisseurs who are not satisfied with just one map, here are multiple other maps from other news outlets on the subject.

Jewish involvement in Palestine dates from between eighty to three thousand years ago. We have to start somewhere, though, so the scope of this article begins in 1967  with UN Security Council Resolution 242. The resolution came out of the Six-Day War between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The details of the Six-Day War are beyond the scope of this article. In practice, the resolution demanded “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force”. In part, if this resolution had been adopted, each state in the region would have maintained its recognized borders at that time. UNSCR 242 did not include a specific list of states, but the UN’s website implies that Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Israel would have been included.

This resolution was not legally binding, however. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), then the recognized government of Palestine, initially rejected Resolution 242. According to the PLO, Resolution 242 implied Israel’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence,” which the PLO would not accept.

Later, though, the PLO became more open to input from the international community. In 1988, the PLO began talks with the US government shortly after the start of the First Intifada. Intifada is an Arabic word that literally means “shaking off [Israeli invasion],” although the term can also be used to generally refer to revolutions or revolts. Around this time a group now known by an acronym, Hamas (short for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmiyyah, which translates to English as “Islamic Resistance Movement), split from the PLO. In 1993, the PLO signed the Oslo Accords, which, among other things, called for a two-state solution via “arrangements for a smooth and peaceful transfer of authority from the Israeli military government and its Civil Administration to the [PLO].” 

Overthrow
Hamas is not solely a military organization, as it has political aims and represents “one of the Palestinian territories’ two major political parties.” Given its Islamist origins, Hamas rejected the PLO’s vision of a secular state, claiming in its original manifesto that “we are unable to exchange the present or future Islamic Palestine with the secular idea.” Hamas called for the destruction of Israel as a state: “Our struggle against the Jews [will continue],” reads their 1988 manifesto, “until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.” This anti-Semitic slant has caused multiple countries and regional entities to designate Hamas as a terrorist organization, including the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Hamas updated its manifesto in 2017, stating that “its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Hamas does not define Zionism in this manifesto, however.

In 2006, Hamas won a majority of seats in parliamentary elections. On June 15, 2007, Hamas took complete control of Gaza with violence and by force. Hamas representatives announced via radio that “the past era has ended and will not return… The era of justice and Islamic rule have arrived.” Hamas has ruled in the Gaza Strip and West Bank ever since. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “Palestinians have not voted for a legislature since 2006, nor a president since 2008.” For comparison, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was elected to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in 2009. He has been the Prime Minister from 2009-2021, and then again from 2022-present.

As of the time of writing, Israel has only declared war on Hamas. However, another entity must be understood for a full picture of the conflict: Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which backs Hamas.

Hezbollah claims direct involvement in the conflict: its leader, Syed Hassan Nasrallah, claimed in a Nov. 3, 2023 speech that “[t]he Islamic resistance in Lebanon started operation the very next day” after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Nasrallah further described the Oct. 7 attack as “a big event to shake this oppressive … occupying, usurping Zionist regime and its supporters in Washington and London.” Hamas has not explicitly accepted or rejected this labeling, though.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Israeli government represent the major players in this conflict.

Goals
Each side of the conflict has stated goals, which are briefly explained here.

Hamas, according to its 2017 manifesto, “believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.” It is willing to consider the 1967 borders as a possibility, though it rejects Israel as a state. Its stated goals involve destruction of the state of Israel, which it labels as “the Zionist project” and thus as an occupying power.

Israel’s goals are threefold. Israeli ministers have spoken about the war as a three-stage operation. The first stage – invading Gaza – has been ongoing since the Hamas attack on Israel in Oct. 2023 that killed approximately 1,200 people. According to AP reporting and the Gaza Health Ministry, as of Feb. 5, 2024, the Palestinian death toll as a result of the ongoing war is 27,478 people. 

Israel’s second stage, according to Netanyahu, is “to destroy Hamas’s governing and military capabilities and to bring the hostages home,” referring to the more than 200 hostages Hamas took in its initial attacks. More information about the hostages Hamas took will be published in part two of this series.

Israel also seeks to maintain security in Gaza. According to Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, “The third step [of the invasion] will be the creation of a new security regime in the Gaza Strip, the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip, and the creation of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel and the residents of the [area surrounding Gaza].” Gallant did not provide further details as to what this “security reality” meant.

Iran-backed Hezbollah supports Hamas. Its role in this conflict would likely be as a spoiler. Hezbollah has little involvement in this war so far, but its strategic location – to Israel’s north – would force Israel to fight on two fronts if Hezbollah were to invade.

This article serves as background for the Israel-Hamas war. In this series of articles, I will address the initial attacks, war crimes committed by both parties and the path to a sustainable peace. 

If there is something in this conflict you believe needs featuring or would like Mr. Naber to write about, please contact the Hilltop Monitor’s email address. He will respond to comments as he is able.

The clash took place during a series of Palestinian protests regarding the commemoration of the loss of their land to Israel, alleged intensification of Israel’s aggression toward Palestine and U.S. President Donald Trump’s official recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Of the 16 people killed by the Israel Defense Forces, one was wheelchair bound and another was a farmer who was allegedly not at the protests. A fellow farmer placed him near the scene collecting parsley in his field when he was shot by a tank. Other recorded injuries are because of live shrapnel, rubber bullets and tear gas.

The U.N. Secretary General has expressed his concern over the clashes, urging both sides to stop participating in any act that could increase tensions or casualties.  

“This tragedy underlines the urgency of revitalizing the peace process aiming at creating the conditions for a return to meaningful negotiations for a peaceful solution that will allow Palestinians and Israelis to live side by side peacefully and in security,” a U.N. spokesman said in a statement.

Some reports indicate that the demonstrations held in support of Palestine were peaceful.

“However, there are also reports that some protestors engaged in stone-throwing and violent behavior; some reportedly carrying weapons,” added Tayé-Brook Zerihoun, the U.N. Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs.

“The large crowds … reflect the Palestinian people’s determination to achieve the right of return and break the siege, and no force can stop this right,” said Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.

Avigdor Liberman, Israel’s Defense Minister, tweeted a message to the contrary, a warning to the people of Gaza.

“Everyone approaching the wall endangers his life, I advise you to continue your normal lives and not engage in provocation,” Liberman tweeted, in Arabic, March 30.

The U.N. Security General Antonio Guterres has recommended an independent investigation into the deaths. However, the Security Council did not decide on any action or joint message after they held an emergency meeting March 30.

Liberman refused the calls for an investigation and added that Israel will not cooperate with any international inquiries into the excessive use of force that resulted in the deaths of the protestors.

Photo credits toAP Photo/Adel Hana.