365 days ago, some 3,500 members of Hamas They entered Israeli territory armed. They infiltrated dozens of militiamen, kidnapped civilians and soldiers and fired thousands of rockets. They killed at least 250 people; a surprise and unprecedented attack which led to the the biggest offensive against Israeli territory in decades. Israel was quick to react: it massively bombed Gaza, killing 232 people during this attack. “Citizens of Israel, we are at war. And we will win it,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu. It was the first stone of a crisis for which there is no end.
So far, Gaza has been massacred, with more than 41,800 dead -16,000 children- by Israeli fire on a territory completely in ruins, where poverty and disease arrive where Netanyahu’s weapons, tanks and bombs did not arrive. A war that extends beyond Palestinian borders, striking directly West Bank -with 609 Palestinian deaths- and Lebanon –which Israel recently launched an invasion-, and in which Iran ended up getting involved. It is the result of a crisis which, far from being a year old, dates back several decades.
Concretely, it was in 1948 that the conflict broke out. That year, the Arab-Israeli confrontation intensified after a UN resolution – published a year earlier – which ended up dividing the territory in two: 55% for the Jews, Jerusalem under international control and the remains for the Arabs (including the Gaza Strip). Loop). Already at the time, differences over the occupation of each area caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who eventually settled in the Gaza Strip. The clashes continued and broke out Six Day War in 1967.
The evolution of the conflict at the international level had, among other consequences, the fact that in 1987 the Hamasa terrorist group created to confront Israel for control of territory and which came to power in 2006 after winning elections. Since then, Israel and Egypt have imposed a devastating land, air and sea blockade on Gaza and thousands of civilians.
Israel, without brakes between war crimes
From the October 7 Massacre Perpetrated by Hamas, the Israeli response to Palestine has been brutal and savage. In the latest chapter of this conflict, which marks its first anniversary, more than 41,800 people died -according to the Gaza Ministry of Health-, among whom are thousands of women and children. Those who have managed to survive are not doing so in better conditions: Netanyahu’s attempts to block all humanitarian aid (food, water and medicine) have a limited life expectancy in a city marked by violence and despair, and where polio has even returned after 25 years without a case.
WHO warns that Israel kills a child every 10 minutes in Gaza
These are figures that show one of the greatest tragedies of our century. As also shown by the scenarios that make up Gaza today: collapsed hospitals -the few who remained standing after the Israeli offensive, which carried out 516 attacks during which 765 people died-, refugee camps with thousands of people crammed together in inhumane conditions – and yet they are not spared from the bombs – and countless houses without anyone after more than three million people (two in Gaza and 1.2 in Lebanon) were forcibly displaced; That is to say those who were able to do so and did not succumb to the multiple ambushes prepared by the Israeli army to prevent many of them from fleeing. Continuous bombings whose objective, justified by the Israeli army, was to eliminate the main leaders of the terrorist group Hamas. The offensive was such that, shortly after the conflict began on November 10, the World Health Organization warned that Israel kills a child every 10 minutes in Gaza. The Director General of the WHO even denounced before the UN that in Gaza “the The hospital corridors are full of injured peoplesick and dying; the morgues are overflowing; surgical interventions are performed without anesthesia; Tens of thousands of displaced people are taking refuge in hospitals; Families in desperate need of food and water are crowded into overcrowded schools. » Faced with this tragedy, just three months after everything exploded, the United Nations International Court of Justice has already ruled precautionary measures against Israel to prevent “genocide” in the Gaza Strip. It did so following a complaint from South Africa, which filed a complaint on December 29 demanding urgent “interim measures”. Thus, the Hague Court ruled that, among the six precautionary measures that the State of Israel should implement within one month, it must avoid committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, guarantee humanitarian services enough or prevent the destruction of evidence on the prevention and repression of the crime of genocide.
Despite this, Israel continues to fail in its obligation to guarantee the basic needs of the Palestinian population in Gaza. A frightening fact: during the month of August of that year, Israel refused or obstructed 46% of humanitarian operations United Nations agencies and their partners in the Gaza Strip. This is why the UN has come to affirm that the country led by Netanyahu is committed serious war crimeand therefore – taking into account the other factors reported previously – a trial was opened before the International Criminal Court which ended with a clear decision: order Israel to stop its offensive in Gaza.
The world, a simple observer of the tragedy
The truth is that beyond the absolute condemnation of different international organizations or the Spanish recognition of the State of Palestinethe inaction of the West has been total. Calls for ceasefire and peace, in the search for feasible solutions for the two territories, there have been many, but few practical exercises have been carried out by the West to put an end to the drama. In November 2023, a brief four-day ceasefire resulted in a hostage exchange, but this halt did not mark the end of the conflict; rather a simple comma.
And in this humanitarian pause during which at least 105 Israeli hostages were exchanged for nearly 240 Palestinian prisoners, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Qatar had a lot to do with it. The countries which They fought to achieve peace and who repeatedly insisted on obtaining a new ceasefire which, despite diplomatic and mediation efforts, was not obtained.
A widespread conflict in the Middle East
Alongside the war in the Gaza Strip, Israeli violence has reached an unprecedented level also in West Bankwhere Israeli attacks were recorded, and more than 700 Palestinians were killed. This way, Israel extended its offensive to other territories. On October 1, the Netanyahu government launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Under the pretext of not allowing “October 7 to happen again” on any of its borders, the Israeli army began “the next phase of the war” by carrying out “limited, localized and selective ground incursions, based on intelligence “precisely against Hezbollah.” terrorist targets and infrastructure in the south of the neighboring country.
Once started land invasion in LebanonIsrael now recognizes that it did “small raids” in the south of this country. They argue that these operations are aimed at dismantling Hezbollah tunnels that, according to Tel Aviv, the militia used to plan an attack similar to that carried out by Hamas against the kibbutzim. Faced with this, Iran finally ended up entering the conflict. On the same day that Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon, Iran, Hezbollah’s great ally, bombed Netanyahu’s country with hundreds of ballistic missiles.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which claimed responsibility for the attack, justified it as retaliation for the deaths of the political leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Ismail Haniye, and the secretary general of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah , Hasan Nasrallah. Israel has already warned that it will react and that “I’ll pay for it”. In the meantime, it is discussing with the United States the level of retaliation, without ruling out that it could do so. bomb the oil infrastructure or nuclear. A year after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli territory and the military response of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government by bombing and invading Gaza, concern is growing in the face of a conflict that seems endless.
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