Operation Protective Edge: The 51-Day War on Gaza

The war followed a volatile summer. On 12 June 2014 three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank, and Israel answered with an extensive search-and-arrest operation; on 2 July, a sixteen-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, was burned alive in an apparent revenge killing. Rocket fire from Gaza and Israeli strikes escalated, and on 8 July Israel launched Operation Protective Edge. After an opening phase of airstrikes, Israeli ground forces entered Gaza on 17 July with the declared aim of destroying cross-border tunnels. The operation ended on 26 August, after fifty-one days, when both sides accepted an open-ended Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.

The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict put the Palestinian toll at 2,251 killed, including 1,462 civilians — 551 of them children and 299 women — and 11,231 injured, a tenth of them left with permanent disabilities. Preliminary figures compiled by OCHA and the Protection Cluster were slightly lower, at 2,220 killed including 1,492 civilians; the commissions and agencies differ on both the totals and the civilian share, and the exact civilian toll remains contested. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers were killed, and six civilians in Israel — among them a four-year-old boy killed by a mortar at Kibbutz Nahal Oz and a Thai agricultural worker — while up to 1,600 Israelis were injured. Palestinian armed groups fired 4,881 rockets and 1,753 mortars toward Israel, and gunmen in Gaza executed twenty-one people accused of collaboration.

The destruction was unprecedented: some 18,000 housing units were destroyed in whole or in part, much of the electricity, water, and sanitation network was incapacitated, and at the height of the fighting half a million people — 28 percent of Gaza’s population — were displaced. OCHA found that at least 142 Palestinian families each lost three or more members in single incidents, a total of 742 fatalities.

The commission of inquiry, established by the Human Rights Council under resolution S-21/1 and denied access by Israel, reported in June 2015 (A/HRC/29/52) that it had gathered substantial information pointing to war crimes by both sides: by Israel, including strikes on residential buildings that killed entire families and the extensive use of artillery in densely populated neighborhoods; and by Palestinian armed groups, whose indiscriminate rocket fire and executions of alleged collaborators it found might amount to war crimes. Accountability followed on neither side.