Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Israel has illegally occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967. For decades, it maintained both settlements and a regular military presence inside Gaza, as it continues to do in the other territories it occupies. That changed in 2005, when Israel dismantled the settlements in Gaza, withdrew the military, and embarked on what it called a policy of “disengagement.” Since then, Israel has often argued that it is no longer occupying the strip — even as it controls virtually all access of people and goods in and out of it
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after several failed bids at a unity government, a U.S.-backed coup — carried out in conjunction with Fatah — unseated Hamas. In the bloody civil strife that followed, Hamas ceded the West Bank and seized control of Gaza by force, effectively bifurcating Palestinian political authority between the two territories, already physically divided by Israel’s occupation.
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Until last weekend, Israeli officials seemed to believe that the delicate balance with Hamas could last forever. The government’s strategy was to periodically “mow the grass” to repress Hamas’s militant efforts through regular ground invasions and bombing campaigns that have killed thousands of Palestinian civilians over the years. “On the one hand, yes, Hamas, and Hamas’s governance of the Gaza Strip specifically, has been a great asset, mainly because it allowed Israel to believe that it can put two million Palestinians in a cage,” said Baconi. “There would be escalations of violence every now and then, but fundamentally, [Israel] would have successfully severed the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine. And it could have done that only by having Hamas in power because it can claim that there’s this bloodthirsty terrorist organization that’s bent on its destruction that justifies the blockade and make the world forget that the blockade and efforts to strangulate Gaza started well before Hamas was even established.”