On 7th October 2023, Hamas, a militant group based in the Gaza Strip, launched a deadly attack on Israel, killing over 1,400 Israelis and kidnapping over 200. In retaliation, Israeli airstrikes have killed, as of this video, over 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza, where Palestinians have lived for decades under an occupation and blockade. 

Since 1967, Israel has imposed tight restrictions on travel and essential goods such as food, fuel, medicine, and water in its occupied territories. In 2007, those restrictions became even tighter in Gaza after Hamas seized power there. Since then, it has been nearly impossible for Palestinians to leave Gaza or to access an adequate supply of essential goods.

Today, the Gaza Strip, with a population of over 2 million Palestinians, is a victim of what many call “collective punishment” as Israel bombards its population, shuts off access to internet, power, food, water, and medicine, forces them to leave their homes, and prepares for a ground invasion.

This latest episode of Vox Atlas explains how the experience of Palestinians in Gaza got to this point, and what’s behind Israel’s occupation and its blockade of Gaza. 

Sources and readings: 

Thank you for watching! We know we couldn’t cover everything about the Gaza Strip, this was just a start. Below are a couple of sources and readings you might find helpful to learn more. 

Gisha, an Israeli nonprofit that works to protect freedom of movement for Palestinians, has done so much research on the closure of Gaza and how it impacts Palestinians there. Below are the reports and visuals that we found most useful. 

Visualizing Palestine, a nonprofit that uses data and research to make visuals, and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, have useful databases that track fatalities over time in the Gaza Strip, Israel, and the West Bank. 

This United Nations’ document database helped us understand infrastructural destruction in past conflicts with Israel.

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappé, professor of history at University of Exeter.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi, professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University.

The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development by Sara Roy, senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.

( Source: Vox )