On Israel and Palestine- Part 3

Introduction:

The creation of the state of Israel almost 80 years ago and the conflict between its citizens and the displaced Palestinians and surrounding countries has become one of the most polarizing geopolitical topics in popular discourse. Those with any “skin in the game,” so to speak, (eg. Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Jews) probably have very strong beliefs about which “side” is in the right, and the actual facts and events occurring on the ground are unlikely to significantly change those beliefs, myself included. Discourse about this conflict across all forms of media is rampant in an attempt to sway public opinion, with wild claims being made to justify the actions of one side or another. It’s obviously a very complex topic and I encourage anyone interested in an in-depth look at Palestine to do their own research and reading, while being very critical of what biases sources may have.

The purpose of this series of essays is to give some basic background information for those with relatively little knowledge of the conflict and its history, to help clarify some of the conflicting and opposing claims you will often hear online or in the news, and help explain why I believe the actions of the state of Israel definitively put them on the wrong side of history and merit harsh criticism.

This will be an 8-part series that I will post over the following weeks/months, with this identical introduction in each. I will list sources I referred to at the end of each post but, as this is not an academic treatise, the formatting will be informal and will not be embedded into the text itself.

Parts 1-3 are going to give some historical background on the region. One of the fundamental arguments made by both sides in the conflict is that the land belongs to them on a historical basis. It is helpful then, to have a basic overview of the broad strokes of history and what populations lived there at various points throughout history. This will be an extremely basic summary, as you could read books on each of these periods in history and still have a lot to learn.

Parts 4-8 are going to be formatted essentially as responses to frequent claims made in defense of Israel and will cover a variety of topics, including Israeli behavior in relation to the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, the relationship between the US and Israel, and what the future may hold. 

This is Part 3, a summary of the history of the region from the 1990’s until today.  

I highly recommend reading these essays in order, and you can find the other essays here:

Part 1- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-1/

Part 2- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-2/

Part 4- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-4/

Part 5- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-5/

Part 6- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-6/

A (Very) Brief History of the Region

The end of the Cold War, the First Gulf War, and shifting focus to Iran:

We jumped ahead a little bit with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. Though we will return our focus to the Palestinians shortly, first we need to go back to cover a few more important details about the geopolitical situation in the Middle East as it pertains to Israel.

The start of the 1990’s would see two major events fundamentally change the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East: the end of the Cold War and the First Gulf War (ie. the multinational military response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait).

Thus far, we have not said much about American support of Israel, and we will cover that in a lot more detail in Part 7. For now, it suffices to say that America provided a tremendous amount of financial, military, diplomatic, and intelligence support to Israel. There were a few reasons for this which we will briefly touch on here: many Israelis were themselves immigrants from the US, there were important voting blocs in the US that were Zionist, there is a powerful Israeli lobby that advances their interests in the US, and Israel could act as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East on behalf of the Americans.

During the 1970’s and 1980’s Iraq had rapidly militarized, and was vocally strongly against Israel, though given that they did not share a border, their militaries did not have significant contact with one another (aside from intermittent air strikes carried out by the Israelis, and intermittent missile launches by the Iraqis, primarily during the First Gulf War). However, of the Arab nations that were openly opposed to Israel, Iraq was the most powerful. By the end of the First Gulf War, their military had been shattered by the American-led counter-invasion of Kuwait. In 1994, Jordan signed a separate peace deal with Israel, making them the second Arab nation (after Egypt) to end diplomatic hostilities with Israel. This meant that during the 1990’s, the only countries in Israel’s vicinity that were actively hostile to it were Syria and Iran (the Gulf Arab nations were nominally opposed to Israel, but had never done much militarily to oppose them other than manipulating global oil supply to apply diplomatic pressure on occasion).

The end of the Cold War meant that there was now less of a reason for the US to support Israel (or at least, many Israeli political figures were concerned about this), and the weakening of Iraq meant that now Iran was a convenient scapegoat to focus attention on to maintain their own relevance. It was in the mid 1990’s that Israel began lobbying hard in the US to expand American sanctions to not only include Iraq, but also Iran as well. This was also when the narrative of the Iranian nuclear program entered mainstream discussion, to help turn Iran in the global consciousness from not just a regional threat, but a global threat that only Israel could adequately curb.

It’s in the 1990’s that we see the pieces move in to place to create a situation that is much more familiar to a reader who is more aware of the events of recent years: the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon led to the creation of Hezbollah, mass arrests of Hamas members during the First Intifada and deportation of them to occupied southern Lebanon allowed Hamas and Hezbollah to create stronger ties, Iranian support of Hezbollah (and as a result, Hamas) would give the Iranians a way to meddle in Lebanese politics and give them an ally on the Israeli border, and Iranian support for the Alawite Syrian regime would create the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance that has reframed the Arab-Israeli conflict in recent decades.

The Palestinian Authority and the Second Intifada:

Once the Oslo Accords were signed and implementation began in 1994, Arafat finally went to Palestine to rule over the little land he had been given. But it is perhaps more accurate to say that he went not as a leader, but as Israel’s policeman. The PLO morphed into the Palestinian Authority, the new government of the West Bank and Gaza. The way the Oslo Accords were structured divided the land into Zones/Areas A, B, and C, where Zone A was under exclusive Palestinian control, and Zones B and C were under Israeli control but Israel was supposed to gradually withdraw from those areas. The trap Arafat had found himself in, was that in order to meet the demands of the Israelis, he had to quell any further Palestinian resistance. However, the Oslo Accords were deeply unpopular amongst the majority of Palestinians, and Hamas continued to push for armed resistance to the Israelis. Arafat therefore, with the help of Israeli military intelligence, set himself up in the typical style of an Arab autocrat, with a robust security apparatus used to surveil, oppress, and jail his political opponents.

It would not be enough. In Zone C, which comprised 60% of the land, Israel would continue an aggressive policy of expansion of settlements, despite ostensibly agreeing to plan for withdrawal once the Palestinian Authority had achieved adequate stability. In 2000, the number of settlers had almost doubled since the signing of the Oslo Accords, increasing from about 80,000 to 150,000. By 2003, that number had increased to 400,000 (and in 2026, is estimated to be about 750,000). Whatever intentions Rabin might have had when his government signed the accords, when Netanyahu became Prime Minister after him, there was clearly no interest in abiding by the agreements. Israel would renege on every promise for withdrawal from the land it had agreed to in the Oslo Accords.

This would lead to increased resistance on the part of the Palestinians, and in turn, harsh reprisals by the Israelis. In 1998, the Wye Agreement was reached between the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis, which primarily allowed for increased CIA activity in the West Bank and Gaza to help suppress Hamas, essentially encouraging the human rights abuses being carried out by the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis. In return, the Israelis would withdraw from an additional 13% of the land of the West Bank (though, absurdly, a quarter of that needed to be kept as a nature preserve and so Palestinians would not be allowed to build there). There was no word in Wye about preventing violence by the Israeli settlers. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli foreign minister at that time, told settlers to “seize every hilltop they can in the West Bank” in response to Wye. I will quote a 1998 Amnesty International Report here, as they summarize things nicely:

“Killings of Palestinians by Israeli security services or settlers have led to suicide bombings and the deaths of Israeli civilians. These have led to waves of arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, torture and unfair trials. The Palestinian population have been the main victims of such violations… the Occupied Territories have become a land of barriers, mostly erected by Israeli security services, between town and town and village and village…. There is general consensus by the international community, that Israel has legalized the use of torture.”

Due to the failure of the promises of the Oslo Accords to materialize, there were high-profile talks in 2000 known as the Camp David Summit. This “peace process”, these talks conducted between Israelis and Palestinians and brokered by the Americans, were farcical. The Americans were not impartial negotiators, their diplomatic envoys were themselves Jewish (and one was a former staff member of AIPAC), and the Americans were unwilling to apply any pressure on the Israelis, preferring instead, as Clinton put it, to “let the parties themselves make the hard decisions”. While this rhetoric may sound nice, when one of these parties (ie. Israel) is the infinitely more powerful of the two, this allows them to essentially do whatever they want. At these talks, the Israelis demanded a unified Jerusalem and in return the Palestinians could have about 64% of the 22% of Palestine that was left, Arafat refused to concede all of Jerusalem to the Israelis, and so the talks went nowhere and showed the world that the Oslo Accords would not work. Ironically, Arafat’s refusal to capitulate at the Camp David Summit was likely the most popular thing he had done amongst the Palestinians.

If we have gone into a little more detail here with regards to negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians compared to the rest of these essays thus far, it’s because I am trying to reiterate that as time has gone on, the material conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had continued to worsen: limited economic opportunity, increasing settlements, wanton violence carried out against them by the Israeli military and settlers, farcical negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with the Americans “mediating”, absolutely no progress made towards statehood, and the only thing that had changed since the Oslo Accords was now Arafat’s government was able to participate in the political repression of his people. The Palestinians, trapped under military occupation, in land that was increasingly being characterized by security checkpoints and curfews that made life extremely challenging, had learned that they had little to lose by fighting the Israelis, and had learned politics was no longer a viable instrument of progress.

In September of 2000, Ariel Sharon and an escort of a thousand Israeli policeman marched to the Temple Mount (around which are multiple Islamic holy sites), the response was a massive Palestinian protest. Israeli snipers would fire into the crowd, and this would kick off the Second Intifada.

This was characterized by similar actions on the part of the Palestinians as the First Intifada: widespread protests, economic boycotts, stone throwing, and armed resistance where possible. Over time, the increased prominence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad made suicide attacks (frequently targeting Israeli civilians) a regular part of the conflict. As the conflict continued, it took on the more overt character of a war. The Israeli response was harsher this time, to the extent that shelling of Palestinian towns and strafing rocket attacks by helicopters scarcely made the news. Palestinian protesters and stone throwers would be met with bullets.

This conflict would last for almost 5 years, and would see about 1,000 Israelis killed and about 3,300 Palestinians killed (a significant proportion of whom, perhaps a third, were children). Again though, it’s worth remembering that the death toll doesn’t tell the whole story. Israeli repression was harsh, and involved widespread curfews, teargassing and use of rubber bullets (as well as frequent use of live ammunition) against peaceful crowds or stone-throwers (often met with live ammunition), prolonged detainment without trial, use of collective punishment (for example, the policy of bulldozing the home of family members of suicide bombers), widespread security checkpoints and roadblocks that disrupted Palestinian life, an economic blockade of the West Bank and Gaza, use of torture against detainees, and targeted extrajudicial killings.

The Second Intifada would finally end with 2 major events: the withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza in 2005 (and without the military there to protect them, the withdrawal of Jewish settlements in Gaza as well) and the creation of the West Bank Wall, which was a large wall built along the West Bank’s borders. However, the vast majority (up to 85% of the length of the wall) runs inside of the West Bank, effectively dividing up many communities and leaving them stranded from each other within the West Bank. While the creation of this barrier has been criticized (primarily because of the optics of building a large concrete wall around this occupied people, and because of the way it divides up and disrupts the border communities in the name of protecting the settlers in the West Bank), this was admittedly an effective method for impairing the Palestinians’ ability to attack within Israel, and the ratio of only 3 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli seen in the Second Intifada would only ever become more lopsided in the future.

The 2006 Invasion of Lebanon:

In 2005, Rafic Hariri, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon and perhaps the country’s most prominent Sunni politician was assassinated. Recall that at this time, though the Israelis had completely withdrawn from the country, Lebanon was still occupied by Syria. Syria was, at the time, ruled by Bashar Al-Assad, a dictator from the minority Alawite sect (considered to be a subsect of Shiism) and an ally to Iran and Hezbollah. It was believed that the assassination was carried out by Hezbollah at the behest of the Syrian government, and the massive protests that erupted came to be known as the Cedar Revolution and led to the withdrawal of Syria from the country. Hezbollah came under particular scrutiny due to their role as supporters of the Syrian government and as the last armed non-governmental force left in Lebanon following the end of the civil war. Though this has never been officially admitted, (and the official reason is to negotiate the release of Lebanese citizens held in Israeli jails), likely as a distraction from their domestic unpopularity, in July of 2006 Hezbollah ambushed an Israeli patrol at the border, killed three soldiers, captured two, and killed another five soldiers during a rescue attempt.

In response, Israel launched airstrikes targeting not only Hezbollah but also infrastructure around the country, in their tried-and-true tactic of collective punishment, the justification being that it was up to the Lebanese people to stop Hezbollah and if they didn’t, they were also targets. There was overwhelming evidence of intentional targeting of civilian targets, particularly civilians on roads trying to flee the south, looking for safety. In retaliation, Hezbollah launched missile attacks at Israel, claiming to have aimed them primarily at military sites. Israel would launch a ground invasion and a naval blockade of Lebanon, but would meet stiff resistance on the ground. After about a month with no significant progress made in the deterioration of Hezbollah’s combat capabilities, a ceasefire was reached. In the last few days of the war before the ceasefire was implemented, Israel would sew the south of Lebanon with cluster bombs, killing another 83 Lebanese in the month after the ceasefire took hold. In total about 165 Israelis would be killed, 44 of them civilians, while about 1200 Lebanese (~800-1000 civilians, of which about a third were children) would be killed.

The conflicts in Gaza;

Meanwhile in Palestine, a ceasefire ending the Second Intifada had been in place since 2005. Elections were held in 2006 and Hamas gained a majority of the seats in Parliament, defeating Fatah (a faction of the PLO, which was led by Mahmoud Abbas following Arafat’s death in 2004). Hamas, designated a terror organization by the “West”, did win the elections in 2006 fairly, though more due to the Palestinians’ disgust with the Palestinian Authority and Fatah. When Hamas won the elections, though they promised to work with the Israeli officials and create a joint government with Fatah, they were immediately boycotted by the Israelis and Americans, and Israel demanded Fatah make up for their failures at the polls with military action. This led to a small civil war between Hamas and Fatah, with the end result being that in 2007, Hamas gained control of Gaza while Fatah retained control of the West Bank. Henceforth, there would now be “two Palestines”, the Palestine led by Hamas in Gaza getting financial and military support from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, and Iran; and the Palestine led by Fatah in the West Bank which would cooperate with Israel and get financial support from the West, and generally spend more time torturing and killing its Palestinian political opponents within its borders than protesting Israeli land grabs for their “settlements”. Democracy would be of little consequence for either one of these Palestines thereafter.

Israel (and Egypt) closed its borders with Gaza and imposed a complete blockade (by land, air, and sea) after which Israel said it would only allow “humanitarian supplies” through, with Israeli officials quoted as saying their policy was to “keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse”. Hamas would try to circumvent this blockade through the use of tunnels, and would generally protest the current state-of-affairs through violence: periodically firing locally-made rockets into Israel while Israel would shell and launch air strikes into Gaza in turn.

A six-month ceasefire was agreed to in 2008, and was generally observed by Hamas and led to the lowest level of violence since before the start of the Second Intifada. Israel, in what they claimed was a pre-emptive attack, broke the ceasefire when they launched an attack on a tunnel and killed several Hamas fighters. In retaliation, the rocket attacks into Israel resumed, and Israel began to launch air strikes, and later a ground invasion. The conflict ended after Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire, and after 3 weeks of fighting, somewhere between 1200-1400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. Looking beyond the loss of life, the Israelis had destroyed hundreds of factories and businesses, and thousands of homes in Gaza. Combined with tens of thousands of displaced civilians and a continuation of the blockade, it resulted in a humanitarian crisis where virtually the entire population became dependent on international assistance for food and medical supplies.

The cease-fire would somewhat hold for several years, where there would be intermittent rocket fire from Gaza (often from other militias besides Hamas) and the Israelis would launch raids into Gaza (between 2009 and 2012, killing almost 300 Palestinians, at least 113 of whom were civilians), while the blockade continued. This eventually boiled over into another intensive campaign in 2012, where the Israelis launch an air campaign and Hamas would launch rockets, and after 8 days a ceasefire would be reached, by which time ~160 Palestinians (105 civilians) would be killed, and 6 Israelis would be killed (4 civilians). Similar scenes would be repeated in 2014 and again in 2021, and a steady-state of misery was reached: Hamas would refuse to back down and would intermittently launch rockets into Israel and try to use tunnels to circumvent the blockade, Israel would intermittently launch military raids and air strikes and continue the blockade, and meanwhile the Palestinians in Gaza were trapped under a total blockade with no economy to speak of and reliant on international aid for survival.

During this time period, there were no major conflicts with the West Bank, but a similar pattern emerged there of continued expansion of settlements, bulldozing of Palestinian homes, use of security checkpoints to disrupt the daily life of Palestinians, and interruption of economic development therein. Protests that did intermittently erupt in the West Bank would be met with disproportionate force, but Fatah succeeded in preventing additional mass uprisings during this time.

The Abraham Accords:

 Meanwhile, outside of Palestine proper, Iraq had been crippled by the American invasion in 2003 and subsequent civil war that had erupted, Syria was wracked by its own civil war starting in 2011, Jordan and Egypt continued to have diplomatic ties with Israel (with Egypt dealing with its own unrest and 2 successive changes in government, and the destruction of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 took away a key source of support for Hamas), Lebanon continued with its unstable balance of power between the Christians and Sunnis and Shia and in 2019 would experience runaway hyperinflation, and Iran continued to overtly denounce and oppose Israel. While all this was happening, the governments of the Gulf Arabs developed friendlier ties with Israel. Bahrain and the UAE signed the Abraham Accords in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also seem to have an improving relationship with Israel, though with no overt deals made due to the unpopularity of Israel among their own populace.

Current Events: (as of writing this on May 22, 2026)

I have tried to set the stage for what the Middle East looked like in 2023, and the relationship between Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza in the preceding decades, and now we can discuss the current ongoing events.

Palestine:

On October 7, 2023 Hamas and affiliated militias launched a coordinated attack on Israel, using a combination of mass rocket attacks and a ground assault from Gaza using modified vehicles and killed about 1,200 Israelis (~828 civilians and 367 soldiers) and kidnapped another 251 in the surprise attack. This was the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust (though frankly, the ratio of civilian:soldier deaths in these attacks is perhaps more skewed towards soldiers compared to the Palestinian deaths in most of the “wars” in Gaza since 2008), and Israel responded with expected fury. Their immediate counterattack incorporated the “Hannibal Directive”, where it was acceptable to kill their own captured civilians/soldiers to prevent their capture, and it is unclear how many of their own people the Israelis killed in this way. Israel prevented any further flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, cut off the electricity to the region, and began an intensive bombing campaign. A few weeks later, a ground invasion was launched. Using a combination of ground forces and air strikes, they have steadily leveled Gaza and turned it to rubble.

The conflict has been characterized by occasional periods of ceasefires, that are then broken by the Israelis once they have sufficiently reorganized and resupplied their forces. Since October of 2025, there is ostensibly a ceasefire in place, with Hamas having released all remaining hostages, but despite this “ceasefire”, Israel regularly launches airstrikes into Gaza and continues its blockade. The majority of Gaza is under direct Israeli occupation. The Israeli response: the combination of complete blockade and resulting famine and lack of medical supplies, extensive bombing campaign, and physical occupation have led to a catastrophic loss of life, with virtually no meaningful effort made to spare civilian lives. As many as 80,000 Palestinians have been directly killed by the Israeli military, with the overwhelming majority (~80%) being civilians (and about a third of them children), and likely many more have been killed by the complete collapse of infrastructure and the economy due to sickness and famine, to say nothing of the thousands of Palestinians arrested and detained without trial. Simultaneously, in the West Bank, protests that erupted were met with lethal force, and about 1200 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. Hamas has been severely weakened, with the majority of their senior leadership killed, thousands of their fighters killed, their tunnel networks and other infrastructure destroyed, but still they persist and the immense amount of suffering the Israelis have subjected the Palestinians to will ensure they have no shortage of recruits.

Syria:

In 2024, the 13-year Syrian Civil War would come to a dramatic end, when Islamist militias would sweep through the country and depose Assad, who (along with his father) was one of Israel’s most stubborn opponents. Israel would take advantage of the chaos, not by trying to be diplomatic with the new government that had toppled its old enemy, but instead by launching the single largest number of airstrikes in a day to destroy any remaining Syrian military resources. It would then expand out from beyond the Golan Heights (remember, Syrian territory annexed by Israel after the 1967 war) and capture additional territory in Syria as a “buffer zone” for what was ostensibly already a buffer zone (though, in fact, instead of treating the Golan as a buffer zone, they had allowed settlers into the region in the decades following their occupation). This is territory they continue to occupy until this day.

Iran:

Iran, in the preceding decades, had been empowering its proxies around Israel and working on their own missile program as a way to make up for the difference in air capabilities between the two nations. The most notable of these included Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iraqi militias, and to some extent Hamas. They also had a key ally in Syria before the Assad regime was toppled in late 2024.

Israel would frequently launch overt attacks against Iran for many years, with airstrikes (or other methods of assassination) targeting Iranian military figures in Iran itself, in Syria, in Lebanon, and in Iraq. Israel would assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and launch airstrikes against Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Despite, this Iran would not retaliate directly, and instead use its proxies.

Following the October 7, 2023 attacks and the invasion of Gaza, Israel drastically ramped up its airstrikes targeting Iranian military commanders. In April 2024, after a wave of Israeli strikes targeting Hezbollah, Iran retaliated by having hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles launched from Iran, the Houthis, and Iraqi organizations, though this did limited damage (however it is notable as the first time, to my knowledge, that Iran had attacked Israel directly). Israel continued its assassination campaign, resulting in a massive missile barrage from Iran to Israel in October 2024. There was continued escalation and Israel launched an extensive air campaign in June 2025 targeting Iranian military and political officials as well as nuclear scientists and infrastructure. Iran retaliated by launching missiles, and this time the US, which had up until this point primarily contributed by shooting down Iranian missiles, directly attacked Iranian nuclear sites, after which a ceasefire was reached.

The ceasefire held, and negotiations were taking place in February 2026 when the US and Israel broke the ceasefire by launching a surprise attack that took the form of extensive airstrikes. These airstrikes were aimed at the destruction of Iranian military infrastructure (including ballistic missile launchers and drone/missile fabrication), assassination of political and military figures (including the assassination of Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei), destruction of their nuclear facilities and uranium stockpile, and regime change (likely thought to be feasible due to massive protests in Iran in January 2026).

The regime was not toppled. Iran has retaliated by attacking oil producing infrastructure in neighboring Gulf countries through the use of drones and missiles, launching drones and missiles at Israel, and attacking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz to close it. Up until now, the death toll is somewhere between 4-6,000 dead Iranians (unclear how many are civilians, but on the first day of the strikes a particularly heinous American attack on a school killed about 175 Iranian schoolgirls), 15 dead American soldiers, about 50 dead Israelis (about half of whom are civilians), and anywhere from 3-11 killed in Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE. Iranian retaliation, particularly the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has seemed to be effective. Israeli and American objectives for regime change seem to have failed, and while military infrastructure was affected, since the ceasefire was implemented in April 2026, there have been reports that Iranian drone and missile production has been reconstituted much faster than expected. Due to impact on the global economy, there is tremendous international pressure to resolve this conflict. It’s unclear what the results of subsequent negotiations will be, but as of now, it appears that despite initial successes, Israeli and US geopolitical objectives will not be achieved.

Lebanon:

Shortly after the Israeli invasion of Gaza in October 2023, Hezbollah would join the conflict by launching rockets into northern Israel, resulting in the Israeli evacuation of some northern villages. The stated goal of Hezbollah was to pressure Israel into a ceasefire in Gaza by promising to stop attacks into Israel if Israel stopped attacking Gaza. Israel would retaliate with airstrikes into Lebanon.

This escalated in September of 2024, when it turned out Israeli intelligence had sourced the pagers that Hezbollah was using to coordinate communications and detonated them, killing 42 people and injuring thousands. Israel immediately followed up with a massive air campaign and assassinating Hassan Nasrallah, the long-time leader of Hezbollah. This was followed up with a ground incursion a few miles into Lebanon in October 2024, and continued air strikes. There was some resistance on the ground to the Israeli invasion, but it was clear that after the assassination of key Hezbollah leaders and the pager attacks, they were disorganized and ineffectual. A ceasefire would be reached November 2024, where Israel would agree to withdraw from Lebanon, but Hezbollah could not be active south of the Litani River. Almost 3,000 Lebanese civilians were killed during this invasion, and somewhere between 3-5,000 Hezbollah fighters.

Over the next year, Israel would fail to meet its obligations to withdraw and remained in several Lebanese villages in the south, and regularly launched airstrikes during this time, killing another ~hundred Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah for their part, did not launch any attacks during this time, though it is unclear if they truly withdrew behind the Litani. In March 2026, in response to the Israeli and American surprise attack of Iran, Hezbollah launched a handful of rockets into Israel that did no damage. Israel considered this a violation of the ceasefire (despite dozens of their own airstrikes into Lebanon since November 2024) and would renew an extensive air and ground campaign into Lebanon. Since March 2026, over 3000 Lebanese civilians have been killed by the Israelis, and about 1.2 million people have been displaced (about 20% of the country’s population) and Israel has begun to systematically destroy Lebanese towns and villages in the south. Hezbollah seems to have reorganized in the interim into much more of a guerilla organization operating in small cells, and have used drones to attack the Israeli occupation forces. This has been surprisingly effective, and the Israelis have had to drastically reduce day-time operations. It seems that Israel’s goal with this occupation and these airstrikes is to pressure the Lebanese government into disarming Hezbollah. This is unlikely to happen, for a variety of reasons, and in the meantime Hezbollah will be able to continue using drones to attack the Israeli forces, while Israel continues its practice of collective punishment of the Lebanese people.

Concluding Remarks:

So that’s it, that’s my brief summary of Israel and Palestine, I tried to hit some of the more important events in the long history of the region, and tried to provide historical context before talking about current events. Israel’s current appalling behavior towards Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon is now frequently justified by Israeli politicians (and their supporters online) by pointing out the barbarity of the October 7 attacks, but I have tried to show that history did not start on October 7, 2023.

If you’ve made it this far reading Parts 1-3, thank you, I appreciate it, and I hope it was educational. For the rest of this series, we’re going to address specific claims that are frequently made to defend Israeli actions in relation to their Arab neighbors and the Palestinians, we’ll discuss the relationship between the US and Israel, and we’ll talk about what the future may hold. Hopefully, having this historical background will help put everything into context going forward.

Part 4- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-4/

Sources:

• The Modern Middle East: A History by James Gelvin
• The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years by Bernard Lewis
• The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
• Night of Power by Robert Fisk
• The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappe
• Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar
• 1998 Amnesty Internation Annual Report and Amnesty International 2001: Israel and the Occupied Territories: State Assassinations and other Unlawful Killings
• For events since 2023: mostly news sources such as Al Jazeera and Reuters