Dan Steinbock lays out the background of the Netanyahu government’s apparent final solution, now underway, for the Palestinian territory. Part 4 in a 5-part series.
People outside Indonesian Hospital in Jubilee, just north of the Gaza Strip, after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza on Oct. 8. (Palestinian News & Information Agency, or Wafa, for APAimages, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
This is the fourth article in a five-part series. Here is part one, two and three.
By Dan Steinbock
The World Financial Review
With a population of over 2 million people on some 365 square kilometres, the Gaza Strip is one of the world’s most densely populated areas and “largest open-air prison.”
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, it became an Egyptian-administered territory. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, it came under Israeli occupation. The precursor of Hamas, Al Mujamma al Islami (“The Islamic Centre”), was established in the Israeli-occupied Gaza in the 1970s under the auspices of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. (For more, see the 2007 book Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of Militants, Martyrs and Spies by Zaki Chehab and Ilan Pappe’s 2017 book The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories.)
One of their adherents was the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin,