Siege, war and the present

Since Israel and Egypt imposed a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza in 2007, the Strip (roughly 365 square kilometres holding more than two million people, among the most densely populated places on earth) has been fought over repeatedly: major Israeli military operations in 2008–09, 2012, 2014 and 2021 each killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians alongside combatants, and Hamas and other Gaza-based factions periodically fired rockets into Israel. Between wars, the blockade continued, restricting the movement of people and the import of goods, including materials needed to rebuild what each war had destroyed. UN agencies had, by the early 2020s, been warning for years that Gaza's water, electricity and healthcare systems were approaching collapse.

7 October 2023

On 7 October 2023, Hamas and allied fighters broke through Gaza's perimeter fence and attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the deadliest single day in Israel's history, and taking some 250 people hostage into Gaza. It was, by any definition, an atrocity, and Israel responded with a military campaign of a scale and intensity beyond anything Gaza had previously experienced.

The war that followed lasted two years. Israeli bombardment and ground operations levelled large parts of Gaza's cities; the World Bank and UN estimated that a majority of all buildings in the Strip, including most hospitals, universities and much of its housing stock, were damaged or destroyed. By the time a ceasefire took hold in October 2025, Gaza's Health Ministry (whose casualty figures the UN has, in this and prior conflicts, generally found to be broadly reliable) put the death toll at more than 67,000 Palestinians since 7 October 2023, the large majority of them, according to UN and independent monitoring, women and children. The toll kept climbing after the fighting stopped, as recovery teams pulled more bodies from the rubble of flattened neighbourhoods and forensic teams identified previously unrecorded dead; it passed 70,000 within weeks and stood at more than 73,000 by September 2026. Israel disputes aspects of that toll and says it targeted Hamas military infrastructure that was, it argues, deliberately embedded in civilian areas; independent investigators, UN bodies and human rights organisations have documented widespread strikes on hospitals, schools and refugee camps, and Israel faced, and continues to face, accusations of war crimes and, from South Africa in a case still before the International Court of Justice, of genocide, which Israel rejects. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and for a senior Hamas commander separately.

Alongside the killing, Israel's near-total blockade during the war produced famine conditions in parts of Gaza, confirmed by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system in 2025, the first time famine had been formally declared in the Middle East. Nearly all of Gaza's population was displaced at least once, many people repeatedly, as Israel issued evacuation orders that shrank the habitable area of the Strip over and over.

The ceasefire, and what has followed

A ceasefire, brokered as part of a US-backed plan, took effect on 10 October 2025, bringing an exchange of the remaining hostages and Palestinian prisoners and a surge in humanitarian aid. It has held only loosely. Israeli strikes, shelling and gunfire continued inside Gaza through the months that followed, and the casualty count kept climbing: Human Rights Watch, citing Gaza's Health Ministry, put the toll at around 856 Palestinians killed and 2,463 wounded by mid-May 2026, and by early September 2026 the Ministry's cumulative figure since 10 October 2025 had reached more than 1,350 killed and upward of 4,500 injured. The Israeli military has generally described individual strikes as responses to specific ceasefire violations (gunmen crossing the "yellow line" dividing Israeli- and Palestinian-held areas, attacks on its soldiers, rocket fire), while the UN's human rights office documented a similar pattern moving the other way, recording Israeli forces shooting at civilians, raiding residential areas beyond the yellow line, and bombing or shelling Gaza well over a thousand times combined in the truce's first six months alone.

By April 2026, six months into the truce, the UN's human rights chief, Volker Türk, said Palestinians across Gaza remained unsafe, pointing to the continuing killings alongside acute food insecurity still affecting roughly three-quarters of the population and reconstruction that had barely begun. UN-appointed independent experts issued a similar warning that August, describing an escalation in attacks on Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank even as international attention had largely moved on. Much of the wider peace plan, covering Gaza's future governance, reconstruction and any pathway to Palestinian statehood, remained, as of this writing, largely unimplemented.

The West Bank, in the same years

While international attention focused overwhelmingly on Gaza, the occupied West Bank saw its own sharp deterioration. Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian communities rose to their highest recorded rate in at least twenty years, averaging several a day through 2024 and 2025, and settlement construction reached record levels, with dozens of new outposts established in a single year. In January 2025, the Israeli military launched a large-scale operation, named Iron Wall, in and around the refugee camps of Jenin and Tulkarm, displacing more than 40,000 Palestinians (by most accounts the largest displacement inside the West Bank since 1967) and demolishing hundreds of homes in camps that had stood for over seven decades. Human rights organisations, including Israeli ones, described a pattern in which settler violence and military operations worked together to steadily push Palestinian communities off land in areas slated for settlement expansion.

Today

As of this writing, close to eighty years after the Nakba, the Palestinian people remain divided between a besieged and devastated Gaza, a West Bank fragmented by settlements, checkpoints and military control, a diaspora of refugees and their descendants still without the right of return affirmed by the UN in 1948, and roughly two million Palestinian citizens of Israel navigating a status that is formally equal but, by the assessment of most human rights organisations, substantively unequal in practice. No Palestinian state exists. Sumud, steadfastness, is still the word Palestinians reach for to describe what it takes to keep living, and keep telling this story, while all of that remains true.