Recent Developments
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip conducted weekly demonstrations between March 30 and May 15, 2018, at the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. The final protest coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the Nakba, the Palestinian exodus that accompanied Israeli independence, as well as the relocation of the U.S. embassy to the contested city of Jerusalem. While most of the protesters were peaceful, some stormed the perimeter fence and threw rocks and other objects. According to the United Nations, 183 demonstrators were killed and over 6,000 wounded by live ammunition.
Also in May, fighting broke out between Hamas and the Israeli military in what became the worst period of violence since 2014. Before both sides reached a cease-fire, militants in Gaza fired over one hundred rockets into Israel and Israel responded with strikes on more than fifty targets in Gaza during the twenty-four–hour flare-up.
Background
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, primarily as a conflict over territory. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Holy Land was divided into three parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip. Successive wars resulted in minor shifts of territory until the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel because of Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The conflict was calmed by the Camp David Accords in 1979, which bound Egypt and Israel in a peace treaty.
Yet once the wars over territory were over, a surge in violence and uprisings among the Palestinians began. The first intifada, in 1987, was an uprising comprising hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1993 Oslo Accords mediated the conflict, setting up a framework for the Palestinians to govern themselves and establishing relations between the newly established Palestinian Authority and Israel’s government. In 2000, inspired by continuing Palestinian grievances, the second intifada began and was much bloodier than the first. After a wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in 2015, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced that Palestinians would no longer be bound by the Oslo Accords.
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