The Israel-Palestine War 2023.

The war that has flared up between the Hamas political leaders in the Palestinian Gaza Strip and Israel has led to a terrible political, economic, social, and humanitarian crisis. It is also a military and security crisis. Israel has occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights since 1967. When Hamas came to power in 2006, having won the elections, Israel's contact and cooperation with Gaza became very limited. Yet, Israel has not been able to control developments in the area through its occupation. Hamas' terrible terrorist attack on Israel on the seventh of October could only happen because the occupiers had failed. The attack killed over 1400 people, including 260 in a massacre while attending a music festival. Over 200 Israelis and other nationals were taken as hostages. More attacks and retaliation have taken place, and more people have been killed on both sides.

Israel has told people in the northern part of the tiny and overcrowded Gaza Strip, where Gaza City is situated, to move south in the forty-five-kilometre-long territory, with a width of only five to twelve kilometres, before it begins its massive ground attacks. The United Nations and humanitarian aid organisations have said it is impossible for over one million people, almost half of Gaza's total population, to evacuate and move in a few days, including people in hospitals, old people, children, and so on. Thus far, Israel has not begun its full operation, but it is likely that it will, knowing how brutal it can be, it continues with targeted attacks and has blocked supplies of electricity, petrol, water, food, and even medicines and other necessities. Shops in Gaza will run out of food in a matter of days. This week, a terrible explosion at a hospital in Gaza killed more than five hundred people, but Israel denies having been behind it, although not believed by anybody.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), based on the West Bank in Israel, a landlocked enclave to the northeast of the Gaza Strip, does not cooperate with the leaders of the Gaza Strip. The moderate President Mahmoud Abbas (87) is heading the PA. No full elections have taken place since 2006. The living conditions for the Palestinians on the West Bank are better than in the Gaza Strip, but it is also not a sustainable and lasting land for the Palestinians, indeed not because Israel continues increasing its settlements there, but because of limited livelihoods and general conditions.

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