October 6
What was happening in Gaza on October 6 and why October 7 was inevitable.
In 2003 — four years before Israel imposed its crippling blockade of Gaza — Baruch Kimmerling, a sociologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, described the enclave as “the largest concentration camp ever to exist.” In 2004 — three years before the blockade — Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland categorised Gaza as a “huge concentration camp.” Being Jews, one assumes they would know a thing or two about concentration camps.
Arnon Sofer, a demographer at the University of Haifa, is described as the architect of the isolation of Gaza. In 2004, he advised the government of Ariel Sharon, the 11th Prime Minister of Israel, to seal Gaza off completely and kill anyone who attempted to break out of the concentration camp.
This is how Sofer described his evil scheme in a Jerusalem Post interview: “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” (Emphasis mine.)
Those were Israelis accurately describing the ground reality in Gaza before its illegal blockade and siege by the Jewish supremacist state began in 2007 and remains in place to this day.
The illegal blockade begins
As it began its inhuman and illegal blockade, Israel withdrew its settlements from the tiny strip of land — which at its longest stretch doesn’t exceed the total distance of a marathon by much and at its widest is barely 7.5 miles. This besieged territory is home to 2.3 million Palestinians, over half of them children.
In 2016, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, condemned Israel’s blockade as illegal, stating: “As a form of collective punishment imposed upon an entire population, the blockade is contrary to international law.”
The punishing Israeli blockade meant that no resident of Gaza — unless he or she had the permission of the Israeli government (which was nearly impossible to acquire) — could get out of Gaza, no matter how urgent their need.
If you were a cancer patient in need of critical healthcare, you needed Israel’s permission to leave. If you were a scholar selected at a top university in the US or Europe, you needed Israel’s permission to leave. If you just wanted to travel and go see the Pyramids in Egypt — which are just across the border from Gaza — you needed Israel’s permission to leave. If you wanted to go fishing in the waters on your very own shore, you couldn’t go very far without getting fired on and potentially killed by the Israelis patrolling the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel also controlled not just who but also what went inside Gaza. It decided, if and in what amounts, food, medicines, school supplies, toys, milk, and even chocolates could get into the enclave.
In short, Israel exercised total control over Gaza, which it completely occupied despite its physical absence from inside the territory (discounting any traitorous informants).
Gaza became unlivable
The blockade made Gaza unlivable. Already in 2012, a UN report concluded that “to ensure that Gaza in 2020 will be ‘a liveable place,’” herculean efforts were required.
Those efforts were never made.
As a result, two years before the United Nations’ estimated timeline, Gaza was already classified as “unlivable.”
In 2018, the UN Special Rapporteur said that “with an economy in free fall, 70 percent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system, Gaza has become ‘unlivable.’”
Israel’s frequent bombings — “mowing the grass”
But Israel wasn’t content with just the blockade.
To make matters worse, the Jewish supremacist state regularly bombarded Gaza with incendiary weapons every now and then in line with its policy of “mowing the grass.”
It didn’t care that, as Norman Finkelstein once described, every blade of grass that it mowed in Gaza was a child, a mother, a father.
Once it destroyed the homes, hospitals, and schools through its indiscriminate bombardments, Israel didn’t allow them to be rebuilt. It blocked the necessary building materials from entering the enclave.
Often, before the destroyed infrastructure could be rebuilt (due to Israel-imposed resource constraint) another round of bombings would commence destroying even more houses, more schools, and more medical complexes.
Between 2007 — when Israel’s blockade of Gaza began — and October 7, 2023 — the day of the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood — numerous reports had been produced by humanitarian agencies and statements made by relief workers and officials working on the ground in Gaza that the conditions inside the enclave were not fit for human habitation.
The Great March of Return
In another attempt to gain some concessions from the Israelis, in 2018, the Palestinians in Gaza started the Great March of Return.
It was a series of peaceful protests during which every Friday thousands of Gazans marched to the border with Israel to protest their living conditions and demand the internationally-recognised right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes stolen by the Jews in 1948 in what is now Israel.
(Nearly 4 in 5 residents of Gaza are refugees from historic Palestine — what is today known as Israel. They were forced out of their homes in 1948 by the Jewish terrorists during the Nakba or the Catastrophe.)
Also read: How the Zionists brought terrorism to the Middle East
Despite the peaceful nature of these protests — which lasted almost two years from March 2018 to December 2019 — Israeli snipers killed 223 Palestinians and injured over 8,000 more.
More stunningly, Israeli soldiers “kneecapped” the Palestinian protesters.
Kneecapping is a term used by the Israeli military to denote firing directly on the knees of the Palestinians to permanently disable them.
One Israeli soldier boasted about his personal tally of 52 kneecaps. Another bragged about soldiers kneecapping 42 Palestinians in a single day.
In other words, the Jewish supremacists in Israel were shooting peaceful Palestinian protesters — armed with nothing more than catapults — for fun, crippling them for life, and killing by the hundreds.
Oslo Accords: A brief history
Gaza didn’t need to suffer like that.
Along with the West Bank, Gaza, which abuts the beautiful Mediterranean Sea on its western border, was supposed to be part of a future state of Palestine.
This was the promise of the Oslo Accords — a pair of agreements that were signed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, or the PLO, and Israel between 1993 and 1995.
The Accords were meant to lead to peace in Palestine-Israel and ultimately to the formation of a Palestinian state over the next five years.
The Accords were so lopsided that Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said described them “as an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.” In other words: complete capitulation.
Said: “[In the Oslo Accords] there was nothing about the stopping of settlements, there was nothing about Jerusalem, nothing about refugees, there was nothing about sovereignty. It was a complete sham.”
Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, who was part of the Palestinian delegation in Oslo, has said that “the agreements were set up in order to sell out the Palestinians.”
Ashrawi: “People believed that they could achieve liberation through a political process but these were dusted afterwards completely.” She went on to state: “When I saw that agreement, I was extremely disappointed. But I was extremely concerned that the built in flaws, the serious obstacles within the agreement itself, conceptually, and in many ways, would backfire.”
However, despite the complete capitulation of the Palestinians in Oslo, Israel still failed to fulfil its end of the bargain. It’s almost as if fulfilling the obligation was never in its plans and the sham of the Accords was only meant to give its regime propagandists a catch-all phrase to shut down any question of a Palestinian state.
Israel continued to expand illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories before, during, and after the Oslo Accords.
At the time of the signing of the Accords, just over 100,000 Jewish settlers lived in the area of what was supposed to become the state of Palestine. However, instead of the Israelis withdrawing their settlers from the West Bank and Gaza, as stipulated in the Accords, their numbers had swollen to 700,000 in 2024.
They keep building new settlements to bring more Jews from all across the world and settle them in the stolen Palestinian territories while squeezing the native Palestinians tighter and tighter in ever-shrinking bantustans.
Moreover, the Jewish settlers do not live in peaceful co-existence with their Palestinian neighbours. They are heavily armed by the Israeli military — with weapons distributed by Israeli cabinet ministers. The Jewish settlers use their state-supplied weapons to scare, torture, beat, and kill the native Palestinians on their own lands. The Israeli police either aids these violent settlers or simply looks the other way when they go on their frequent rampages.
The settlers vandalise farmlands of the indigenous Palestinians. They uproot their precious olive trees. And steal their farm animals.
In short, the Jewish settlers are a constant menace and a mortal danger to the Palestinians.
Oslo did Palestinians no good.
Here are some accounts from native Palestinians:
“The settlements have grown more after Oslo than before it.”
“We witness our own family and friends being killed and arrested on a daily basis. We get humiliated at military checkpoints, whenever we are trying to leave or enter cities or villages. And we witness our people being expelled from their lands while more and more settlements are being built in their place.
Yara Hawari, the co-director of Al-Shabaka, an independent Palestinian think tank, says that the only party that benefitted from Oslo were the Israelis: “The key process of Oslo was Palestinian statehood and we know that has obviously not been achieved. Instead, what we see is these little pockets of false Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank.
“The only people that have won from the Oslo Accords or who have actually gained are the Israelis, the Israeli regime which now controls the West Bank in its entirety, has Gaza under siege and basically has looted all of the Palestinian resources — and this was laid out in the Oslo Accords.
“So Oslo handed over exactly what the Israeli regime wanted, which was more land and less Palestinians.”
Moreover, the Oslo Accords gave the Israelis a mantra.
Every time anyone spoke about the plight of the Palestinians or the possibility of a Palestinian state, the Israeli leadership would simply point to the so-called Oslo peace process and move on.
No debate. No discussion. “Oslo peace process” — a favourite Israeli catch-all to deflect all criticism of their policies that abused and harmed the Palestinians.
Al-Aqsa Mosque desecration
Not only are the Israelis killing and maiming Palestinians and vandalising their homes and shops, but they are also frequently desecrating the third holiest mosque in Islam — Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.
The Israeli authorities have imposed limits on the number of worshippers they allow inside the mosque complex for the five daily prayers as well as the congregational Friday prayers.
Not only that, worshippers have to pass through multiple security checks where harassment is rampant. Often, worshippers, who travel long distances to pray at the sacred mosque, are denied access by the heavy-handed Israeli officials for no reason.
Worse, the Israelis regularly beat the Muslims worshippers and vandalise the mosque complex.
This desecration of the mosque has become something of an Israeli ritual.
During Ramadan, which fell this year between March and April, the Israeli state authorities and settlers launched brutal attacks on Muslims for merely making their way to the mosque for prayers during the holiest month in the Islamic calendar.
The violation of the mosque’s sanctity was particularly severe in 2021 when the Israeli police attacked worshippers in the prayer area, fired tear gas shells, destroyed carpets and books, and broke the mosque’s glass windows. A similar sequence of events followed a year later, leading to the death of a Palestinian and dozens more injured.
Moreover, while Muslim access to their religious site is increasingly being curtailed, with random rules that prohibit people above a certain age from visiting, intrusive checkpoints, and the ever-present threat of violence, the Israeli state is giving its Jewish citizens near carte blanche at the site. They do as they please.
They attempt to smuggle literal goats for Passover sacrifice, they storm the mosque to celebrate Purim, they carry out Talmudic rituals and dances at the mosque to mark the eve of Yom Kippur, they trample upon the sacred site in celebration of Hanukkah, they assault the third holiest mosque in the world to observe Shavuot, and they make it a point to desecrate the Islamic holy site to celebrate Sukkot. The list is endless. You name a Jewish festival and you will be sure to find Al-Aqsa desecration as part of the celebrations.
It is grotesque.
As if to rub the collective Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim noses further on the sacred floor of Al-Aqsa, the Israeli cabinet held a meeting inside a tunnel dug under the mosque in May 2023.
Also read: Israel continues Al-Aqsa desecration, one of the Hamas red lines that prompted the October 7 attack
Abraham Accords
On top of the Israeli treachery in their dealings with the Palestinians and the desecration of the third holiest mosque in Islam, the Palestinians were also being increasingly betrayed by their supposed allies, the neighbouring Arab states.
In 2020, the United Arab Emirates signed the so-called Abraham Accords and normalised its relationship with Israel.
Soon after, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan signed normalisation deals with the Israelis.
Saudi Arabia appeared on its way to sign the Abraham Accords just before Al-Aqsa Flood of October 7. The largest Arab state still appears on course of normalisation despite witnessing a year of genocide of their fellow Arabs by the Jewish supremacists in Israel.
No one was talking about the Palestinians, not even their fellow Arab states.
Emboldened, Benjamin Netanyahu revealed a map of the “New Middle East” at the United Nations on September 22.
In his map, there was no Palestine.
All of the Palestinian territory was marked as Israel.
Everything failed
Palestinians in Gaza did everything within their means to alleviate their suffering:
Appeals were made. Flotillas set sail. Talks commenced. Peaceful protests took place. Peace processes were spoken about.
But nothing worked.
Appeals were rejected. Flotillas were raided (and their participants killed). Talks ended with lofty statements but without solutions. Peaceful protesters were handicapped and shot dead. Peace processes remained mere processes with no prospects of peace.
The Abraham Accords meant the Palestinian couldn’t even count on their fellow Arabs.
And Netanyahu’s brazenness at the UN with his “new Middle East” map meant that the Israelis were not even attempting to hide their settler-colonial project anymore. Moreover, outside of Palestine there were barely any protests against Netanyahu’s incendiary histrionics at the UN.
Things had come to a head.
Something had to give. And it did.
This article is the first in a three-part series on the valiant Palestinian resistance of October 7 to the brutal occupation by the Jewish supremacists in Israel and its aftermath.
Read the second part, October 7, here; and the third part, October 8 and after, here.
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This is an absolutely brilliant article. Thank you for doing all this valuable research and sharing it.
“The UN” “ In 2018, the UN Special Rapporteur said that “with an economy in free fall, 70 percent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system, Gaza has become ‘unlivable.’” “ there you have it.
Since 2018 the UN have tried to portray Gaza as a dead land.
The UN is the Palestinians curse.
Only UNGA can save it.
Note also, the UN allowed decades of impunity for Apartheid in South Africa.
It was the great NAM “ Non Aligned Movement” which freed it from the chains of the United Nations.
The israeli project is failure and an abomination, as it stands, it has lost all rights to exist.
Only israelis can save israel from itself, and the time is running out fast.
Peace, freedom, dignity and justice for Palestine.