WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF THE CONFLICT?

The conflict pits Israeli demands for security in what it has long regarded as a hostile region against Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own.

Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the modern State of Israel on May 14, 1948, establishing a safe-haven for Jews fleeing persecution and seeking a national home on land to which they cite deep ties over generations.

Palestinians lament Israel’s creation as the Nakba, or catastrophe, that resulted in their dispossession and blocked their dreams of statehood.

In the war that followed, some 700,000 Palestinians, half the Arab population of what was British-ruled Palestine, fled or were driven from their homes, ending up in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israel, a close U.S. ally, contests the assertion it drove Palestinians from their homes and points out it was attacked by five Arab states the day after its creation. Armistice pacts halted the fighting in 1949 but there was no formal peace.

Palestinians who stayed put in the war today form the Arab Israeli community, making up about 20% of Israel’s population.

WHAT MAJOR WARS HAVE BEEN FOUGHT SINCE THEN?

In 1967, Israel made a pre-emptive strike against Egypt and Syria, launching the Six-Day War. Israel has occupied the West Bank, Arab East Jerusalem, which it captured from Jordan, and Syria’s Golan Heights ever since.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israeli positions along the Suez Canal and Golan Heights, beginning the Yom Kippur War. Israel pushed both armies back within three weeks.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and thousands of Palestinian fighters under Yasser Arafat were evacuated by sea after a 10-week siege. In 2006, war erupted in Lebanon again when Hezbollah militants captured two Israeli soldiers and Israel retaliated.

In 2005 Israel quit Gaza, which it had captured from Egypt in 1967. But Gaza saw major flare-ups in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021 that involved Israeli air raids and Palestinian rocket fire, and sometimes also cross border incursions by either side.

As well as wars, there have been two Palestinian intifadas or uprisings between 1987-1993 and again in 2000-05. The second saw waves of Hamas suicide bombings against Israelis.

WHAT ATTEMPTS HAVE THERE BEEN TO MAKE PEACE?

In 1979, Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty, ending 30 years of hostility. In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the Oslo Accords on limited Palestinian autonomy. In 1994, Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan.

The Camp David summit of 2000 saw President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat fail to reach a final peace deal.

In 2002, an Arab plan offered Israel normal ties with all Arab countries in return for a full withdrawal from the lands it took in the 1967 Middle East war, creation of a Palestinian state and a “just solution” for Palestinian refugees.

Peace efforts have been stalled since 2014, when talks failed between Israelis and Palestinians in Washington.

Palestinians later boycotted dealings with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump since it reversed decades of U.S. policy by refusing to endorse the two-state solution – the peace formula that envisages a Palestinian state established in territory that Israel captured in 1967.

WHERE DO PEACE EFFORTS STAND NOW?

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has focused on trying to secure a “grand bargain” in the Middle East that includes normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, custodian of Islam’s two holiest shrines.

The latest war is diplomatically awkward for Riyadh as well as for other Arab states, including some Gulf Arab states next to Saudi Arabia, that have signed peace deals with Israel.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN ISSUES?

A two-state solution, Israeli settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and refugees are at the core of the dispute.

Two-state solution: an agreement that would create a state for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip alongside Israel. Hamas rejects the two-state solution and is sworn to Israel’s destruction. Israel has said a Palestinian state must be demilitarised so as not to threaten Israel.

Settlements: Most countries deem Jewish settlements built on land Israel occupied in 1967 as illegal. Israel disputes this and cites historical and Biblical ties to the land. Their continued expansion is among the most contentious issues between Israel, the Palestinians and the international community.

Jerusalem: Palestinians want East Jerusalem, which includes sites sacred to Muslims, Jews and Christians, to be the capital of their state. Israel says Jerusalem should remain its “indivisible and eternal” capital. Israel’s claim to the eastern part of Jerusalem is not recognised internationally. Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – without specifying the extent of its jurisdiction in the disputed city – and moved the U.S. embassy there in 2018.

Refugees: Today about 5.6 million Palestinian refugees – mainly descendants of those who fled in 1948 – live in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. About half of registered refugees remain stateless, according to the Palestinian foreign ministry, many living in crowded camps.

Palestinians have long demanded that refugees should be allowed to return, along with millions of their descendants. Israel says any resettlement of Palestinian refugees must occur outside of its borders.

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It took the Israeli army half a day to reach the kibbutz of 750 people in southern Israel and fighting continued there for three days.

In that time Hamas gunmen killed and mutilated dozens of civilian residents.

“Mothers, fathers, babies, young families killed in their beds, in the protection room, in the dining room, in their garden,” Maj Gen Itai Veruv of the Israel Defence Forces told the BBC, as his troops searched homes for bodies of victims. “It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.”

The kibbutz was one of the first Israeli settlements reached by Hamas militants when they launched an assault early on Saturday morning.

The community had a security team, and houses had safe rooms, but they – like the highest echelons of the Israeli army and government – were not prepared for the wave of attackers racing out of the breached Gaza.

Rampaging fighters armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and hand-grenades gunned down dozens of residents and mutilated some of the bodies, Veruv and other soldiers said, describing a number of atrocities.

They killed them and cut some of their heads, it’s a dreadful thing to see,” Davidi Ben Zion, the deputy commander of Unit 71, the paratroopers who led the Israeli forces into Kfar Aza, told Reuters.

“Thank God we saved many lives of many parents and children,” he said. “Unfortunately, some were burned by molotov [cocktails]. They are very aggressive, like animals.”

The attack was so rapid that milk and coffee from Saturday’s breakfast still sat on the table of one home visited by a journalist from the Washington Post, beside a kitchen floor smeared with blood.

Outside, rows of once tidy streets lined with palm trees and banana plants were shrouded by the smell of death, and disfigured by the wreckage of war.

Bodies lay in gardens where they had fallen, the victims so numerous that the mortuary teams needed hours to collect them all. Homes were pockmarked with signs of fighting, and some reduced to rubble, and beside them were scattered torched cars and piles of broken furniture.

Israeli soldiers who combed slowly through the village on Tuesday warned visiting journalists to stay out of homes that had not been cleared, warning they could be booby-trapped with explosives.

The wreckage of a paraglider used to fly over Israeli defences lay beside one path, along with motorcycles that carried other militants out of Gaza, the BBC reported.

In a speech on Tuesday evening, the US president, Joe Biden, said the attack by Hamas, which has killed at least 1,000 people, “brings to mind the worst rampages of Isis”.

More than 900 people in Gaza have been killed in retaliatory Israeli airstrikes while enforcing a blockade that sealed off the besieged territory of 2.3 million people from food, fuel and other supplies.

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