Israeli Attack on Gaza, December 2008

Summary: On December 27, 2008, Israeli planes launched an intensive bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip that preceded a ground invasion on January 3, 2009. The troops withdrew on January 21, 2009. Israeli leaders said the attacks were sparked by renewed rocket attacks on Israel launched from Gaza on December 19, 2008, following a six-month cease-fire. Hamas, the Islamist party that governed Gaza, had decided not to renew the cease-fire that had been brokered by Egypt. The Israeli attack was reminiscent of similar attacks on Hezbollah, in Lebanon in 2006, which had the effect of ending attacks on Israeli territory, but also ultimately strengthened Hezbollah politically. Despite bombing and the ground invasion, Hamas continued to launch rockets into Israel, some of which reached further into Israel than ever before. Both sides resisted international calls for a joint cease-fire. During the bombardment and invasion, 1,300 Palestinians were reported to have died; 13 Israelis were killed. In the aftermath of the attack, Israel was accused of using phosphorous rockets illegally and of killing civilians intentionally, as well as having attacked a convoy in Sudan allegedly carrying weapons for Hamas.

Date: December 27, 2008-January 21, 2009.

Place: Gaza Strip.

Incident: The Israeli Defense Forces launched seven days of aerial attacks on the Gaza Strip on December 27, 2008, targeting government installations of the ruling Hamas Party, after Hamas canceled a six-month-old ceasefire and resumed firing homemade missiles into southern Israeli towns. The Israeli air attacks were described as the most intense for many years. In the first four days the bombing raids were blamed for more than 370 deaths in Gaza, of which about 70 were reported to have been civilians. According to news reports the bombing attacks reflected long planning and were generally directed at very specific targets including homes of senior Hamas military commanders, Hamas military headquarters, a television station operated by Hamas, the Hamas interior ministry (police), and Islamic University. Israel also targeted an extensive network of tunnels linking the Gaza Strip to the Sinai desert, part of Egypt, that Israel alleges was used to import arms and to thwart repeated Israeli embargoes of Sinai. In general, Egypt has kept its borders with Gaza closed.

After the aerial bombardment began Israel officially called up several thousand military reservists, massed tanks and armored personnel carriers on its border with Gaza, and gathered a fleet of ships offshore. On January 3, 2009, Israeli troops entered Gaza, quickly bisecting the densely populated territory but avoiding house-to-house fighting in Gaza City. By the time Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza 18 days later the death toll there was listed as 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. Those numbers led to criticism that Israel had used excessive force and had not taken sufficient care to protect civilians. An official of the United Nations Human Rights Council responsible for the Palestinian territories publicly called for an investigation to determine whether Israeli forces were able to differentiate between civilian and military targets in Gaza, a distinction required under international law.

According to subsequent news accounts, during the period of the Israeli occupation Israeli warplanes attacked a truck convoy in Sudan that may have been carrying weapons destined for Gaza.

The Israeli withdrawal was technically unilateral; it was announced by Israel without Hamas having publicly agreed to its own cease-fire. Nevertheless, a few hours after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared on January 18, 2009, a unilateral cease-fire and the withdrawal of troops, a Hamas leader in Syria declared his organization would stop firing rockets into Israel for a week. Moussa Abu Marzouk declared on Syrian television that "we in the Palestinian resistance movements announce a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, and we demand that Israeli forces withdraw in one week and that they open all the border crossings to permit the entry of humanitarian aid and basic goods for our people in Gaza." The delay in the Hamas announcement appeared to be a matter of saving face and avoiding the appearance of succumbing to Israeli military pressure. During the conflict Egypt, in particular, had sought to mediate a cease-fire.

A particular target of the Israelis was a series of tunnels leading from Gaza into Egyptian-Sinai, used to thwart a formal border closing by Egypt. Israel asserted that Hamas had used the tunnels to import armaments, as well as to overcome periodic border closings between Gaza and Israel, used as a means of discouraging rocket attacks on southern Israeli towns. News reports said Palestinians, some of whom built tunnels as private-enterprise transportation systems, began repairs.

In the weeks after the invasion Israeli newspapers carried accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging that women, and even children, had been intentionally targeted by sharpshooters. Israeli officials denied having used excessive force and insisted their troops had tried to avoid civilian casualties. In March 2009 the chief advocate general of the Israeli Defense Forces ordered an investigation into published accounts alleging that a woman and her two children had been shot while walking too close to a "no-go" zone, and that an elderly woman was shot for coming within 100 yards of a house commandeered by Israeli soldiers.

Israel was also accused of illegally using phosphorous shells, which can cause severe burns, on targets, rather than using them for purposes of illumination, which is legal.

Context: The immediate context of the Israeli bombardment was a decision by Hamas in December 2008 not to renew a six-month cease-fire that had been negotiated by Egypt to stop rocket attacks into southern Israel from Gaza. According to an unofficial count by the Israeli government press office, more than 10,000 rockets had been fired from Gaza into Israel between 2001 and the end of 2008.

Israeli officials, notably Defense Minister Ehud Barak, said they would not tolerate a continuation of the rocket attacks, and that the air raids were designed to stop them once and for all. Barak declared that Israel was waging "all out war" on Hamas.

Nevertheless, in the initial days of the air raids, the number of missile attacks actually increased. Some missiles reached further into Israel than ever before; by some estimates, as many as 700,000 Israelis (about one-tenth the population) were within reach of the longer-range rockets launched by Hamas.

The continuing refusal of Hamas to recognize Israel and declare a permanent ceasefire came in a broader context of unrest in the region. Hamas, for example, has long been the recipient of aid from Iran, much like the Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, even though most Palestinians are Sunni Muslims and the political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, is a member of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Iran has repeatedly encouraged Hamas to continue to resist Israel and has promised financial aid.

Arab states in the region, on the other hand, have gradually moved to peaceful relations with Israel. The first Arab state to do so, Egypt, has effectively cooperated with periodic Israeli economic embargoes of Gaza by keeping its own border crossings between Gaza and Egyptian Sinai closed. Hamas has built a network of tunnels under the border to evade the crossing points, and those tunnels were the targets of Israeli bombing in December 2008. Saudi Arabia, the other major Arab state, has long been at odds with Iran and has tried to promote a regional peace agreement with Israel on the condition that Israel surrender all the land captured in the 1967 Six Day War, notably the West Bank and Gaza, and agree to give Palestinians the right to return to land they occupied in 1948 or to provide compensation.

Since 2006 Hamas has been at loggerheads with the other main Palestinian party, Al Fatah, which controls the West Bank under Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah's long-time leader, Yasser Arafat, agreed in 2000 to recognize Israel and to negotiate a two-state solution, one country for Palestinian Arabs and one for Israeli Jews, but a permanent peace agreement has never been signed. One reason is that Israel has long demanded the Palestinian Authority stop attacks on Israeli territory launched by Hamas.

In Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 Hamas won a majority in parliament, putting the legislative government at odds with President Abbas, who had been elected to succeed Arafat as president. In 2007 Hamas effectively expelled the PA government from Gaza, dividing the PA into two regions--the West Bank, governed by Fatah; and Gaza, governed by Hamas.

The Israeli attack on Hamas was reminiscent of Israel's attacks, in July-August 2006, against Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon--also supported by Iran. Those attacks were accompanied by an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Although Hezbollah was eventually defeated, and the attacks on northern Israel started, Hezbollah nevertheless put up a much stronger, and longer, resistance than expected. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was severely criticized for his conduct of the attacks, even as Hezbollah managed to gain significantly more political influence in Beirut. (See separate Background Information Summary on Lebanon in this database.)

Impact: The combination of Hamas ending its cease-fire and Israel's response served to thrust the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back into the limelight, a place it had lost after the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Even before a resolution of the attacks was known, the bombing of Gaza appeared to underscore the tenacity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the ability of Hamas, in this case, to undermine what appeared to be a move by the Arab world towards recognition of Israel.

It also appeared to be a dramatic end to a peace offensive launched by the United States with a peace conference at Annapolis in November 2007. The George W. Bush administration had expressed hopes of concluding a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement before leaving office on January 20, 2009. The government of the Palestinian Authority, on the West Bank, remained largely silent after the Israeli attacks.

In Israel, elections for a new parliament were held less than a month after the Gaza invasion. The Likud party scored significant gains and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked to form a new government. The results showed a shift towards the right--the center-left Labor Party, for example, fell to fourth place, losing six seats, whereas the strongly nationalist Yisrael Beytenu gained four to become the third-largest bloc in the Knesset --and raised questions about the viability of the "two state solution" as the basis for a long-lasting peace settlement. Netanyahu consistently refused to endorse the two-state solution. A string of incidents, ranging from protests against Israel staged in Sweden, Spain, and Turkey, to refusal of sports teams to compete with Israeli athletes contributed to a sense of growing isolation of Israel.

In response to the raids Syria--home to the exile leader of Hamas and the last holdout among the "front line" Arab states bordering Israel--declared that it was suspending its peace negotiations with Israel, even though those talks had been on hold since summer 2008 when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was caught up in an unrelated financial scandal.

The air raids also caused popular protests against Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, whose policy was to keep border crossings between Gaza and Egyptian Sinai closed, even in the light of a building humanitarian crisis caused by repeated Israeli embargoes of Gaza that were designed to pressure Hamas into stopping rocket attacks.

By publicly supporting Hamas, and claiming to be recruiting Iranian volunteers to fight alongside Hamas in Gaza in case of an Israeli ground invasion, Iran, without actual involvement in the fighting, was able to keep the Israeli-Palestinian conflict boiling--at least in the eyes of many Arabs still holding onto the idea of eliminating Israel and willing to participate in street demonstrations calling for "Death to Israel"--as a distraction from possible tensions with the Sunni Arab world led by Saudi Arabia just across the Gulf.

Coming just a month before his inauguration, the situation in Gaza presented Barack Obama with the makings of another urgent international priority --alongside deterioration in the war in Afghanistan and rising tensions between Pakistan and India--at the same time he was confronting a severe domestic economic recession. In many Arab capitals Obama represents fresh hope, with a possible new set of policies that might break with traditional American all-out support of Israel; the conflict in Gaza is seen as a first test of those hopes, not only in Arab capitals but also in Jerusalem.