One thread, every collection
Siege & Blockade
The closure of Gaza — its law, its mechanics, its toll.
27 entries across 11 collections
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Al-Faluja
Gaza · 1949
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 · 1948
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 · 1948
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.
Ghassan Abu Sitta
British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon
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
Journalist shot dead by a sniper while covering the siege of Nasser Hospital
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.
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 in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians
Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé · 2010
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.
Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom
Norman Finkelstein · 2018
Finkelstein's prosecutorial inquest, built from the human rights record, into Israel's repeated assaults on Gaza and the blockade that frames them.
Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
Tareq Baconi · 2018
A documented history of Hamas from its founding to its transformation into the administration of a besieged territory — and of the Israeli policy that made the siege the point.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Mosab Abu Toha · 2022
Poems written from Gaza under siege — a debut that made Mosab Abu Toha one of the most vital young voices in Palestinian literature.
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 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.
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme — the Palestinian clinical record
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), Gaza City, Deir El-Balah and Khan Younis
The independent Palestinian mental health organisation founded in Gaza in 1990 by the psychiatrist Dr Eyad El-Sarraj. It is the longest-running clinical record of what the blockade and the successive assaults have done to people in the Strip, kept by Palestinians treating Palestinians.
Trapped — Gaza's children before this war, after fifteen years of blockade
Save the Children International
Save the Children's 2022 report, a repeat of its own 2018 research, consulting 488 children and 168 caregivers in the Gaza Strip. Four in five children reported living with depression, grief and fear — sixteen months before October 2023. It is the baseline the current figures should be read against.
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