CIt is now fifteen years since Israel reacted to Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 by imposing the collective sanction of an unprecedented siege on the territory’s approximately two million inhabitants. In September 2005, the Israeli army withdrew from it, after thirty-eight years of occupation, but without coordinating this withdrawal with the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, thus permanently weakened against its Islamist rivals, victorious in the legislative elections of January 2006.
This electoral success, far from favoring the integration of Hamas into the political game, opened a cycle of inter-Palestinian violence, which ended in a de facto partition between the Gaza Strip, under Islamist domination, and the West Bank, partly controlled by the Palestinian Authority and subject to Israeli colonization pressure.
Hamas consolidated in Gaza
In February 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy, hardly suspected of hostility towards Israel, described this territory as 360 km2 of ” largest open-air prison in the world », a qualification that is still relevant today. Four conflicts have opposed Israel and Hamas, each time with massive destruction in the Gaza Strip, where, according to Palestinian sources, 1,417 people were killed in December 2008 and January 2009, 166 in November 2012, 2,310 in July and August 2014 and 256 in May 2021.
It is the civilians who have always paid the high price for such hostilities in Gaza, Hamas having consolidated specific protective measures, including underground, of its cadres, militants and installations. On the other hand, the blockade of the territory delivers the local population to the “Nightmare Within Nightmare” of a militia grid by Hamas, in the shadow of a persistent control carried out by Israel, illustrated by the insistent hum of combat drones.
Within Hamas itself, the dynamics of the siege favored the seizure of power by the “hardliners”, led by Yahya Sinouar, imprisoned in Israel from 1988 to 2011 and founder of the armed wing of the Islamist movement. The closure of the Gaza Strip has therefore significantly strengthened Hamas and its “hawks” that it was supposed to weaken, a process that is still at work.
A remote job
Israel continues to de facto control the lives of all the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, because of its very strict control of two of the three land crossing points (the third, at Rafah, opening onto Egypt), as well than access to the sea (from three to ten nautical miles, depending on the crisis) and airspace.
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