Siege & Blockade

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights

Al Mezan

Founded in 1999 and based in Gaza, Al Mezan documents human rights violations in the Gaza Strip, provides legal aid to victims, and advocates for accountability and the rule of law under occupation and blockade.

Ghayath al-Madhoun

1979–

A Palestinian poet of two exiles — his family fled Palestine for Syria, and war later drove him from Damascus to Stockholm — al-Madhoun writes prose poems of siege, asylum, and a longing with the mass of Einstein's equations.

Mosab Abu Toha

1992–

A Gaza-born poet and librarian, Abu Toha writes from the everyday experience of siege, family, and the search for normalcy under bombardment.

Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom

Norman Finkelstein

Finkelstein's prosecutorial inquest, built from the human rights record, into Israel's repeated assaults on Gaza and the blockade that frames them.

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé

Chomsky and Pappé survey the fallout of Israel's 2008–09 assault on Gaza and place it in the long context of occupation, siege, and US complicity.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Mosab Abu Toha

Poems written from Gaza under siege — a debut that made Mosab Abu Toha one of the most vital young voices in Palestinian literature.

Operation Cast Lead

2008–2009

Israel's twenty-two-day offensive on a blockaded Gaza kills some 1,400 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis, and triggers a UN investigation that finds evidence of war crimes on both sides.

The Gaza Blockade

2007

Israel and Egypt impose a sweeping land, air, and sea blockade on Gaza after Hamas takes control, restricting the movement of two million people and essential goods.

Israel's Disengagement from Gaza

2005

Israel unilaterally evacuates some 8,000 settlers and withdraws its troops from Gaza while retaining control of its borders, airspace, and territorial waters — leaving the Strip's legal status as occupied territory in lasting dispute.

Hamas Wins the Palestinian Elections

2006

Hamas wins seventy-four of 132 seats in internationally observed legislative elections, and the boycott that follows sets in motion the Palestinian schism, the 2007 takeover of Gaza, and the blockade.

Operation Pillar of Defense

2012

An eight-day escalation, opened by Israel's assassination of Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari, kills 167 Palestinians and six Israelis before an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.

Operation Protective Edge: The 51-Day War on Gaza

2014

The deadliest escalation yet in Gaza: more than 2,200 Palestinians and 73 people in Israel are killed over fifty-one days, and a UN commission of inquiry finds evidence of war crimes by both sides.

Mom

Refaat Alareer

A miniature portrait of a mother's face, where every line holds a book, a hope, a love — Alareer's tender counterpoint to the poetry of siege.

Gaza Blockade

legal

The Gaza blockade is the closure regime imposed by Israel — with Egypt controlling the Rafah crossing — on the Gaza Strip since June 2007, severely restricting the movement of people and goods by land, air, and sea for a population of more than two million.

Hafrada

legal

Hebrew for 'separation' — the word used in Israeli political discourse for the policy of physically and legally separating Israelis from Palestinians in the occupied territory, and taken up in human-rights analyses of the barrier, the permit regime, segregated road networks and the closure system.

Al-Faluja

Gaza

Al-Faluja was the anchor of the besieged 'Faluja pocket,' where Egyptian forces — among them a young Gamal Abdel Nasser — held out through the winter of 1948–49. Weeks after the Egyptian withdrawal under the armistice, the town's remaining civilians were driven out and its houses destroyed.

Al-Tira

Haifa

Al-Tira, seven kilometres south of Haifa on the western slopes of Mount Carmel, was the most populous village of its subdistrict, with 5,270 people and 45,262 dunums in 1944/45, and the district's largest olive producer. An Irgun raid on 12 December 1947 killed thirteen villagers; after a siege of more than two months the village fell on 16 July 1948 under naval bombardment. Tirat Karmel was built on the site in 1949.

Umm Khalid

Tulkarm

Umm Khalid stood on a sandstone hill less than two kilometres from the sea, on the site of the Crusader Castellum Rogerii Langobardi, with 970 people and 2,894 dunums in 1944/45. Netanya was founded on its land in 1929 and grew around it. An Israeli intelligence report records that the village was evacuated on 20 March 1948 out of a general sense of fear; villagers described a month of blockade beforehand.

Gaza City

Gaza Strip

Gaza City is among the oldest cities on earth — Philistine stronghold, Mamluk and Ottoman provincial center, home of the Great Omari Mosque. Besieged since 2007, it has since October 2023 been subjected to destruction on a scale that has shattered its ancient fabric.

Yarmouk Camp

Damascus, Syria

Eight kilometres south of Damascus, Yarmouk was the capital of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria — its streets named for Haifa, Safad, Lubya and Jerusalem, home before 2011 to some 160,000 Palestinian refugees. The Syrian war emptied it — Al Jazeera counts some 160,000 forced to flee over its course — and those who stayed endured siege and starvation.

Omar Abedelal

A nine-year-old when Burayr was besieged and depopulated in 1948, he recalls the farmland his family had worked for generations and the return they never stopped expecting.

Gaza: Siege and Sumud

One of the oldest cities on earth, under the most documented siege of the modern era — and the people who keep teaching, writing, and reporting through it.

Ghassan Abu Sitta

1969–

Ghassan Abu Sitta spent 43 days operating under siege in Gaza's al-Ahli and al-Shifa hospitals at the start of the war, then became one of the conflict's most prominent medical witnesses, giving testimony to British police and evidence to the International Criminal Court.

Yasser Mamdouh El-Fady

1984–2024

Yasser Mamdouh El-Fady, 40, a journalist with the Kan'an News Agency, was killed by sniper fire near Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis as Israeli forces besieged the city's largest functioning hospital; UNESCO's Director-General condemned the killing and demanded an investigation.