A History of Israel’s Military Occupations of Gaza

Israel’s current genocide in Gaza and recently announced plans to occupy Gaza City are both part of a long and tortured history of Israeli military occupations of the tiny strip.

By Seraj Assi

August 9, 2025

Source: Jacobin

Members of Matzpen demonstrate against the occupation, Israel, precise date and location unknown. (Matzpen.org)

Whenever we imagine that Israel’s genocide has reached its nadir, the country plumbs new depths of evil. Israel’s genocidal energy in Gaza seems bottomless.

On Thursday, nearly two years into the genocide, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Fox News that Israel intends to take military control of the entire Gaza Strip. On Friday, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to occupy Gaza City, which will involve the mass displacement of “all Palestinian civilians from Gaza City.”

If implemented, the planned reoccupation, which comes exactly twenty years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, will unleash Israel’s third military occupation of Gaza, culminating a decades-long history marked by brutal violence, mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing, and endless displacements. Not that Israel is not already an occupying force in Gaza. According to the United Nations, Israel is still occupying Gaza, because it continues to control the territory by land, air, and sea. Freely touting its ethnic cleansing schemes there, now Israel wants Gaza without its people. It’s a settler-colonial campaign branded as military occupation.

Gaza is not a state in conflict with Israel. It’s the largest refugee camp on earth. Squeezed in a tiny sliver of land (1.3 percent of Palestine), the majority of its two million people live in cramped refugee camps, most of which have been in existence for over seven decades.

It started during the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians at Israel’s founding in 1948 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their land and homes in Israel and made lifetime refugees. Nearly 250,000 of those uprooted flooded into Gaza, the last surviving Palestinian city along the Mediterranean coast, tripling its population overnight and rendering it a colossal refugee camp squashed between desert and sea. Providing shelter to the displaced inhabitants of over 250 razed Palestinian towns and villages, Gaza became a Noah’s ark for Palestine after the Nakba.

The tragedy was so profound that the United Nations set up that year a special agency to provide aid to Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief for Palestinian Refugees, which was shortly succeeded by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and soon moved its headquarters to Gaza City.Gaza is not a state in conflict with Israel. It’s the largest refugee camp on earth.

Most of the refugees who flooded into Gaza came from towns and villages in central and southern Palestine and from northern parts as far as Galilee. But those from villages around Gaza had to endure the tragedy of being displaced within sight of their lost lands and homes. As Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan later confessed,

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

Those settlements, built on the ruins of uprooted Palestinians, served as a constant reminder of the Nakba. To cite the late Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, voice of the Palestinian refugees: “Nahal Oz was a military settlement founded by the Nahal units of the Israeli army to harass Palestinian farmers who had been driven out of their villages and had become refugees in Gaza.”

Over the next seven decades, Gaza’s bleak refugee reality would set into motion a long and tortured history of Israeli military occupations of the tiny strip.

Israel’s Brutal Invasions

In November 1956, embarking on its first occupation of Gaza, Israeli forces invaded the territory by launching military raids on its impoverished refugee camps. The occupation took place during Tripartite Aggression against Egypt, which was then controlling Gaza. It started with a series of horrific massacres. Israeli soldiers entered Khan Yunis and collected all adult males from their homes and shot them at their doorsteps and in the streets, killing at least 520 people.

Even Rafah in the south was not safe from Israeli invasions and mass slaughter. On November 12, Israeli forces invaded the refugee camps in Rafah, rounded up male residents, and killed and wounded hundreds of people in cold blood. The bodies of the victims were dumped in the district of Tell Zurab, west of Rafah, where families had to risk curfews to pick up the bodies of loved ones and bury them, though most of the burials were carried out without identification. The bloodshed, known as the Rafah massacre, sent waves of horror through the camps.

And so Gaza got a first taste of what an Israeli occupation was like: thousands of civilians were killed and wounded throughout the whole Gaza Strip, and hundreds of prisoners summarily executed. The carnage was described by the Red Cross as “scenes of terror.” It was so appalling that E. L. M. Burns, the head of the UN observer mission in Gaza, warned that Israel’s atrocities there intended to wipe out Gaza’s refugee population, which according to international law, amounted to an act of genocide.

Because Gaza was essentially a massive refugee camp of displaced Palestinians who were expelled from their homes inside Israel during the Nakba, Israel became the first occupying power in history that uprooted a native population, chased it into exile, and occupied it. (Isarel’s invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s would mete out the same fate to Palestinian refugees there, culminating in the horrific Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was also condemned by the UN as “an act of genocide.”)

Even Israeli military leaders like Dayan were forced to admit that grim reality. As he confessed that year: “What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers dwelled, into our home.”

But the Nakba was only the beginning. Unsatisfied with uprooting Palestinians, Israel would routinely invade Gaza, wreak horror, and carry out a series of massacres. Frequently after 1948, Israeli forces would raid Gaza’s refugee camps, slaughtering and displacing thousands of refugees, and demolishing their homes and camps. In January 1949, with the bloody memory of the Nakba still fresh in Gaza, Israeli forces bombed food distribution centers in Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis at peak hours, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Those refugees who attempted to return to their homes, labeled by Israel as “infiltrators,” were routinely shot on sight by Israeli soldiers.

In August 1953, an Israeli military unit, led by Ariel Sharon, the future prime minister of Israel, invaded the Bureij refugee camp and killed some fifty people in their beds. According to UN officials, Israeli forces threw bombs through the windows of huts where Palestinian refugees were sleeping and shot at those who tried to flee. The massacre was described by a UN commission as an “appalling case of deliberate mass murder.”

Those repeated massacres were part of a wider Israeli campaign to ethnically cleanse Gaza’s refugee population. Following the Nakba, Israel’s founders, including David Ben-Gurion, foresaw the risk of concentrating hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in a coastal strip straddled between the Negev and Sinai deserts with no real way out and no hope for escape or dispersion. Haunted by Gaza’s refugee population and the prospect of Palestinian right of return, and fearing the spectacle of “waves of refugees marching on Israel from Gaza,” Israel attempted to solve the crisis by wiping it out.

When that failed, Israel moved to reoccupy Gaza.

Massacre Upon Massacre

In 1967, war again broke out and Israel invaded Gaza for the second time. It was no easy feat: it took Israel six days to win the war but four years to take control of Gaza. The resistance spurred a second exodus, as tens of thousands of refugees, still traumatized by the memory of the first occupation, were forced to flee the coastal strip to Jordan and Egypt — never to return. Israel’s second and decades-long occupation of Gaza was underway.

The refugee population of Gaza continued to haunt Israeli leaders after 1967. Transfer plans abounded. During Israel’s prolonged occupation of Gaza — which placed refugees under the control of the very forces that had uprooted them two decades earlier — Israeli leaders, notably Levi Eshkol and Dayan, contemplated transferring Gaza refugees to the West Bank, or Sinai in Egypt, or Iraq, or an Arab country in North Africa (the “Libyan Operation”). They even hatched a secret plan, the “Moshe Dayan plan,” to transfer Gazan refugees to Latin America by air, though luckily for the people of Gaza, the plan was deemed costly and unfeasible.

Unsatisfied with military occupation, Israeli forces moved quickly to uproot Palestinians in Gaza, demolish their homes and seize their land, and build Jewish settlements on the ruins of displaced refugees. The settlements prospered while Palestinians suffered under occupation.

Even peace proved costly for Gaza’s refugees. The 1979 Camp David Accords closed off Gaza’s border with Egypt, dividing families by barbed wires, causing further population displacements and house demolitions along the newly demarcated border, depriving Gaza’s fishermen of their traditional access to Egyptian territorial waters. The destruction of Israeli settlements in Sinai was further compensated by an upsurge in settlement activity in Gaza.For nearly two decades, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, while routinely assaulting and raiding its population.

During the second intifada, after nearly four decades of protracted occupation, Israel seemingly withdrew from Gaza, leaving behind over one million camped refugees. When its forces left the coastal strip, Israeli leaders were confident they had finally swept Gaza’s refugee crisis under the rug of “disengagement.”

Meanwhile, Israel continued to control Gaza’s frontier posts, airspace, and territorial waters. Declaring the impoverished enclave a “hostile territory” and viewing its refugee population as a security threat of “existential” proportions that required disproportionate force, Israel routinely subjected Gaza to collective punishment. It continued to subject its population to military operations and invasions. Israel’s pullout was branded to the outside world as a concession, the end of occupation, and the fulfillment of Israel’s obligations toward Gaza and its refugees.

In reality, the withdrawal made the refugee population an easy target for its military incursions and conquests, with entire sections of the camps declared no-go areas for the Israeli patrols. Meanwhile, Israel moved its settlers to new settlements in the West Bank and around Gaza, and before long, Gaza was placed under total siege.

For nearly two decades, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, while routinely assaulting and raiding its population — a brutal chapter that would culminate in the ongoing genocide. All that time, the refugees of Gaza had to suffer the horrifying fate of living under the yoke of the very forces that had ethnically cleansed them decades earlier. Bombarded, under siege, penned in a slaughterhouse, and trapped in an iron cage fashioned by Israel, the refugees of Gaza have come to fathom the depth of their tragedy: there is one thing worse than being displaced, and that is not being able to leave. Many still fear that leaving would amount to a second Nakba, which Israeli leaders have been so determined to carry out.

Every year or so after the Nakba, Israeli forces would invade Gaza. For decades, Israel would subject Gaza to a brutal series of military invasions and occupations, raids and offenses, military incursions and administrations, bombing campaigns and air strikes, repeated massacres and mass displacements, a yearslong blockade that is still in place, and an ongoing genocide with no end in sight.

Israel’s brutality in Gaza has often spawned resistance. Owing to its refugee history, Gaza was the birthplace of the first intifada, known as the stone uprising, which broke out in Jabalya refugee camp (nicknamed “Vietnam Camp”), and was led by unarmed young Palestinians who were born refugees and grew up under Israeli occupation. Gaza then became the symbolic battlefield of the second intifada when, at a crossroads near Bureij refugee camp, twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah was shot dead in his father’s arms, the iconic image of the uprising.

According to French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, Israel has waged at least fifteen wars on Gaza since the Nakba, which has resulted in the near annihilation of Gaza’s 4,000-year-old civilization. In the five wars it has waged on Gaza since the blockade, Israel has killed hundreds of thousands Palestinians while displacing over two million others. In summer 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, Israeli forces slaughtered over two thousand Palestinians in Gaza. Two Palestinian popular uprisings, or intifadas, were brutally suppressed by Israel. Even when seven years ago Palestinians staged a symbolic March of Return within the sealed walls of Gaza, to commemorate the Nakba, they were mercilessly slaughtered by Israel in the hundreds, including children flying kites. Today nearly two years into the Gaza genocide, those past massacres have become a daily spectacle in Gaza.

The tragic irony is that the refugees in Gaza now being slaughtered and displaced were created in the heat of war by Israel itself more than seventy-seven years ago. Except this time, the refugees have nowhere left to go.

Yet Israel’s obsession with Gaza’s refugees is not completely misplaced and will certainly be met with Palestinian steadfastness. As Khoury put it: “For seventy years the refugees have not stopped knocking on the gates of Gaza, which are locked with hatred and death, and they will continue to knock on them until the locks are broken, and Palestine will reach out its hands to its people who return to it invaded by the water and mud of the earth, and build from their death a gate to life.”Email

Seraj Assi

Seraj Assi is a Palestinian writer living in Washington, DC, and the author, most recently, of My Life as an Alien (Tartarus Press).

Senior Israeli Commanders Openly Contradict Netanyahu Claim On Gaza Destruction

By Younis Tirawi

August 10, 2025

Source: Drop Site News

Palestinians try to go about their daily lives amid the rubble of buildings or their makeshift tents during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip on March 31, 2025. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)

It was not a leak. It was not a whistleblower. It was a live, public radio interview broadcast in Israel.

The Israeli officer spoke clearly. He was not in the heat of combat. He explained in calm, calculated detail what had been done to the Palestinian town of Beit Hanoun, once home to 65,000 people—and what would continue to be done.

“Beit Hanoun is completely destroyed,” he said. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but the destruction is total. And we will continue working there until it is completely destroyed.”

On July 14, 2025, Israel’s public broadcasting channel, Kan Reshet Bet, aired a Hebrew-language radio interview with an “anonymous” Israeli lieutenant colonel identified only by his first initial—“A.”—and by his unit, the 646th Brigade, which is currently operating in northern Gaza.

The destruction of Beit Hanoun—located on the northeastern edge of Gaza, close to the Erez crossing—is publicly and proudly touted by Israeli military authorities. Last month, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz shared an aerial photo showing the crushed ruins of Beit Hanoun, and declared that its fate will be the same as that of Rafah, the southern city the IDF is in the process of grinding into fine dust.

Last week, Col. Netanel Shamaka, the commander of the Givati Infantry Brigade, took reporters to visit Beit Hanoun to show the military’s work there. “I believe that within a week we can finish, and what I mean by finish is that there are no more tunnels,” said Col. Netanel Shamaka said. “The mission isn’t to destroy buildings for the sake of it; the mission is to destroy Hamas infrastructure… Maybe 10 buildings will remain standing, which belong to civilians and there are no tunnel entrances in their homes.”

Haaretz military correspondent Yaniv Kubovich, who joined the tour, reported that as Shamaka spoke, “two officers standing nearby used their radios. Trying not to draw the journalists’ attention, instructed field units to fire so there would be ‘some gunfire in the background for the video footage.’”

But below the rank of colonel, the individuals carrying out the destruction—and bragging about it on local radio—are rarely named. In January of this year, the Israeli military implemented a new rule requiring soldiers below colonel to hide their faces and names when speaking to the press. The purpose is to shield the identities of individual soldiers carrying out the genocide from public scrutiny and international law—and, in the case of the Kan Reshet Bet interview, of the commander describing, in real time, the methodical destruction of a Palestinian town. The interview was a confession of intent, delivered calmly and confidently.

The “anonymous” commander, however, let slip a mosaic of hints about his identity. He was a resident of northern Israel. He had four children. His wife’s name is referenced in passing.

And, as it turns out, the 646th Brigade has no combat engineering battalion, which are units responsible for controlled demolitions and bulldozing of buildings. Since 2021, however, the Israeli military has relied on what it calls “combat teams,” allowing the previously mostly fixed brigades to trade and borrow units like interchangeable parts—a tank battalion here, an infantry company there.

The military doesn’t typically announce these temporary restructures. But, back in May, Israeli media reported on an officer in the 924th Combat Engineering Battalion being injured in northern Gaza—and mentioned the battalion was operating under the 646th Brigade’s command.

The voice, the operational details, the battalion, and the family background all point to one man: Ariel Ben Shachar, the commander of the 924th Reserve Battalion. Ben Shachar had spoken to the press a number of times under his own name before the new guidelines forbidding the disclosure of field commanders’ names were issued.

The Israeli military confirmed Ben Shachar’s identity to Drop Site News but requested that his name not be used because he originally gave the interview anonymously. When Drop Site indicated that we are not bound by the solider’s anonymity agreement with another outlet, the military gave the following statement: “Although the outlet was made aware that publishing the names of soldiers who interviewed anonymously endangers their personal safety and violates journalistic ethics, it nevertheless chose to publish their names.”

Ben Shachar maintains an active presence on Facebook and Instagram, where he made several posts broadcasting his first demolition spree in Beit Hanoun, in November 2023. One video, uploaded to Ben Shachar’s personal YouTube channel under the title “The Annihilation of Beit Hanoun,” showed a compilation of houses being blown up, meticulously synchronised to music. Another, uploaded to his Instagram account, showed the demolition of buildings by bulldozers and controlled demolitions; it opens with an animated title screen reading “This is how we annihilated Beit Hanoun.” After Drop Site reached out to Ben Shachar and the Israeli military, some of his posts were removed.

In July 2025, the 924th Battalion returned to what remained of the town. In the interview with Kan Reshet Bet’s Kalman Liebskind and Moav Vardi, Ben Shachar makes crystal clear he is speaking from Beit Hanoun:

Liebskind: What area are you in?

Ben Shachar: Beit Hanoun

Liebskind: Beit Hanoun. For the benefit of the listeners, take a quick look around you—what do you see?

Ben Shachar: Beit Hanoun is completely destroyed. There’s still a lot of work to do, but the destruction is total. And we will continue working there until it is completely destroyed.

Almost without prompt, and with no apparent strategic rationale, he rushes to clarify not as a military jargon but as a declaration: “Beit Hanoun will be demolished and annihilated down to the foundations.”

Liebskind: When you say “continue working”—describe that work. In this particular operation, how long have you already been inside Beit Hanoun?

Ben Shachar: We’ve been here for 11 days since the operation began.

Liebskind: And what have you been doing over these 11 days?

Ben Shachar: We are destroying Beit Hanoun above ground. House by house, of what remains from previous rounds in this place, until the complete destruction of Beit Hanoun. And of course, the main focus of my role is underground — to deal with the subterranean area so that the enemy still hiding down there is defeated and destroyed. If they come above ground, they’ll be attacked. If they stay below, it will be their death trap.

Vardi: Wait, you’re saying you’re going house to house and destroying the houses? That means you’re demolishing each house, checking if there’s a tunnel shaft, and destroying the shaft—just destroying the buildings one by one?

Ben Shachar: Beit Hanoun is a zone that threatens Sderot, Erez, Nir Am, and Netiv HaAsara.

Vardi: Absolutely.

Ben Shachar: This place generates terror and harmed our communities. It’s right up against the fence. It’s a place that requires significant treatment, and it is receiving the treatment it deserves.

Moav: No, just trying to understand—what exactly are you doing?

Ben Shachar: We are carrying out a very tight, decisive offensive operation, which ultimately means that Beit Hanoun will look like Rafah. It will be destroyed completely.

His comments echoed those of Defense Minister Israel Katz just three days earlier, who had declared in a social media post: “After Rafah, Beit Hanoun—no shelter for terror.”

Other commanders have boasted about the destruction of Beit Hanoun over the past month. The commander of the 8105th Infantry Battalion under Israel’s 646th Brigade, in a mid-July interview with Israeli Channel 13, bragged about the “systematic, methodical annihilation of every neighborhood” and the near-total destruction of the town’s urban landscape. This was not a one-off comment; the same lieutenant colonel, who is named elsewhere as Erez Yerushalmi, repeated similar remarks three separate times last month, openly describing how he led his battalion’s operations on Beit Hanoun:

[It’s] totally wiped out. And do you see that elevated neighborhood in Beit Hanoun? That’s the path to Beit Lahia, so we haven’t gotten around to it yet, but when we do, it will be the same…Systematic, military, methodical annihilation of every neighborhood and every urban area in Beit Hanoun. It’s very thorough—not sporadic. We go in with planned attacks and raids, and in the end, when you add one night, and another night, and another night… [you end up with] entire neighborhoods and cities [destroyed].

Erez Yerushalmi did not respond to a request from Drop Site for comment. The IDF, in its statement, did not specifically address the comments made by its commanders, but rather insisted that it operates according to the laws of war.

The IDF operates in the Gaza Strip in accordance with international and Israeli law. Operational activities are directed solely against terrorist organizations and not against civilians, and are carried out when there is a military necessity. The IDF has no doctrine aimed at causing widespread civilian destruction, and such statements do not reflect policy on the ground.

IDF forces are operating in Beit Hanoun to destroy terrorist infrastructure and eliminate terrorists. The Hamas terrorist organization operates from the Beit Hanoun area, carrying out terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF forces, and operates from within and near civilian infrastructure while rigging buildings and routes with explosives, causing extensive destruction.

In stark contrast to Hamas’s deliberate attacks on Israeli men, women, and children, the IDF operates in accordance with international law and takes all possible precautions to minimize harm to civilians.

On January 12, 2025, a week before a temporary ceasefire went into effect in Gaza, the Israeli military radio “Galatz” described how senior Israeli military officials were recommending that they “widen the perimeter established in Beit Hanoun—meaning not allowing the return of the Palestinian population at all, until further notice. And make the entire ridge that oversees the Israeli settlements, which is about half of Beit Hanoun because the ridge is just in the middle…into an extermination zone. A zone into which no return will be allowed at all.”

Military security correspondent Doron Kadosh explained earlier in the report that the operation in Beit Hanoun means:“This is literally house-to-house work. Unlike other times, here ‘house-to-house’ means physically going in—blowing up or demolishing these houses. This requires engineering troops to physically enter these sites.”

According to UNOSAT—the United Nations Satellite Center—as of July 8, 4,170 buildings in Beit Hanoun had been completely destroyed, 712 severely damaged, and 855 moderately damaged. On the UNOSAT data map, Beit Hanoun is completely covered in red, orange and yellow dots, each representing a destroyed or damaged building. The systematic destruction of Beit Hanoun has only continued over the past month.

In a video interview on Israeli channel i24, Yerushalmi—again identified only as the infantry commander in the 646th Battalion—openly admitted that his battalion was carrying out a campaign of indiscriminate urban destruction: “We are now dismantling the opponent’s system—essentially eliminating his terrorists, seizing all his tunnels, and annihilating the entire neighborhood down to its last building. The opponent no longer functions as an organized system; they have shifted to guerrilla warfare. Their battalion has been dismantled, and we are adapting our combat techniques accordingly to fight these guerrilla tactics.”

In interviews with Israeli journalist Avi Ashkenazi published on July 11, several unnamed soldiers described the “systematic erasure” of Beit Hanoun’s neighborhoods through the use of engineering equipment and explosives, stating that they intend to “destroy the area until nothing remains.”

Whenever the war ends, the people of Beit Hanoun will have nothing to come back to, Ben Shachar emphasizes:

Liebskind: Will Sderot be a safer city to live in after this round in Beit Hanoun?

Ben Shachar: Absolutely. What we had here—residents approaching right up to the fence and being seen—today Beit Hanoun is a ghost town. Again, I’m not in the political echelon that will decide whether the enemy will return. But there’s nowhere for them to return to in Beit Hanoun. There are no standing houses to return to and live a normal life.

Unlike the residents of Gaza, however, Ben Shachar will have a home and a job to return to.

Vardi: And tell us—what do you do… What was your job before all this?

Ben Shachar: I’m still working—I work in the defense industry, at one of the companies. They’re waiting for me to return.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he is working at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Israel’s state-owned weapon manufacturer, as an operations manager.Email

Younis Tirawi

• X (Twitter)

Younis Tirawi is a Palestinian journalist covering politics and security in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Leaked Cabinet Transcript Reveals Israel Chose to Starve Gaza as a Strategy of War

Netanyahu chose to blow up the ceasefire and starve Gaza’s population in order to force a surrender from Hamas, while top military and security officials favored moving to the second phase of a ceasefire, leaked cabinet meeting minutes reveal.

By Qassam Muadd

August 10, 2025

Source: Mondoweiss

Israel decided to starve the people of Gaza as a strategy of war and in order to sabotage the ceasefire deal, according to Israeli cabinet meeting minutes leaked on Wednesday to Israel’s Channel 13. 

The document purports to show that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused multiple proposals that would have secured the release of the remaining Israeli captives during the ceasefire between January and March 2025. Netanyahu decided to break the ceasefire, against the advice of top Israeli military and security officials, and to cut off all aid to Gaza to “force Hamas to surrender,” the leak shows.

The Israeli cabinet’s meeting, dated March 1, was to discuss the fate of the ceasefire with Hamas as the first phase of the agreement was set to expire. The prospective second phase of the ceasefire was supposed to see the beginning of talks on the permanent end of the war. The minutes released by Channel 13 show that army and intelligence officials argued for concluding the ceasefire deal, while cabinet ministers opposed it.

Major General Nitzan Alon, the Israeli army official in charge of prisoners and missing persons, reportedly argued that “the only opportunity to release the captives is to discuss the conditions of phase two,” while Ronen Bar, the chief of the Israeli internal intelligence agency (the Shabak), said that his “preferred option is to move forward with phase two,” stating that Israel could “easily” return to war later. “Let’s get everyone back first, then resume the fight,” he reportedly said.

The minutes also revealed that a senior Israeli security official told the ministers that “it is possible to secure the release of more captives, but that requires engaging in talks about phase two — ending the war.” The government, however, led by Netanyahu, rejected the proposal. He was backed by Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer, who reportedly said that Israel was “not prepared to end the war while Hamas remains in power.” Dermer, who supports Netanyahu’s hardline position on Gaza, was named by the Prime Minister as head of the negotiating team in the ceasefire talks.

Also backing Netanyahu’s refusal was hardline Finance Minister Bezelel Smotrich, who lashed out at military and intelligence officials, insisting that they were “misleading the public” into thinking Israel could “stop the war and return to it later,” which Smotrich regarded as “ignorance.” 

For his part, Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, supported a partial deal, saying that, “If Hamas returns even a number of hostages — less than half — that’s excellent.”

On March 18, Israel broke the ceasefire by launching a wave of bombings on Gaza, killing 400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the first minutes of the onslaught. Israel also announced the complete closing of the crossing points, causing an immediate drop in available goods in the strip and cutting off the entry of humanitarian aid. The continuation of the blockade caused the spread of severe hunger, which UN agencies have qualified as famine. UNICEF has called the deaths of Palestinian children due to starvation “unconscionable”.

Israel also halted the work of UN agencies in Gaza, limiting the distribution of the little aid it began to allow in since April to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The GHF is the controversial Israeli-backed and U.S.-run organization that replaced the UN in May, and has forced Palestinians to travel to four distribution centers in the southern Gaza Strip to collect aid. The centers have been described as “death traps” that use aid as “bait” to lure Palestinians into southern Gaza. There, the Israeli army opens fire on aid-seekers, resulting in numerous recorded “aid massacres.” As of the time of writing, 1,561 people have been killed at GHF sites or while waiting for aid trucks in the north, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza.

According to the Health Ministry, some 160 Palestinians, including 90 children, have died due to malnutrition brought on by starvation.