"Israel Declares War on Hamas After Unprecedented Attacks"
What Happened: On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel, firing thousands of rockets and infiltrating Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip. The attack resulted in significant casualties, including civilians and soldiers.
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Israel-Hamas War, war between Israel and Palestinian militants, especially Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a land, sea, and air assault on Israel from the Gaza Strip. The October 7 attack resulted in more than 1,200 deaths, primarily Israeli citizens, making it the deadliest day for Israel since its independence. More than 240 people were taken hostage during the attack.
The next day, Israel declared itself in a state of war for the first time since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The war began with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducting air strikes on the Gaza Strip, followed weeks later by the incursion of ground troops and armored vehicles. By January 2025 when a ceasefire agreement was reached, more than 46,000 Gazans, about 2 percent of the territory’s population, had been killed according to official numbers and two-thirds of the buildings in the Gaza Strip had been damaged or destroyed. About 1,600 Israelis had been killed, including those killed in the October 7 attack.
What led up to October 7
In 1948 the State of Israel was created on land inhabited by both Jews and Arab Palestinians. Hostilities between the two communities that year led to a mass displacement of Palestinians. Many of them became refugees in the Gaza Strip, a narrow swath of land roughly the size of Philadelphia that had come under the control of Egyptian forces in the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war. The status of the Palestinians remained unresolved as the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict brought recurrent violence to the region, and the fate of the Gaza Strip fell into the hands of Israel when it occupied the territory in the Six-Day War of 1967.
In 1993 there was a glimmer of hope for a peaceful resolution when the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) reached an agreement on the creation of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state (see two-state solution; Oslo Accords). Hamas, a militant Palestinian group founded in 1987 and opposed to the more conciliatory stance taken by the PLO, rejected the plan, which included Palestinian recognition of the State of Israel, and carried out a terror campaign in an attempt to disrupt it. The plan was ultimately derailed amid suicide bombings by Hamas and the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist. In 2005, in the wake of the collapse of the peace process, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the settlements it had constructed in the Gaza Strip after 1967, and in 2007, after factional conflict within the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas emerged as the de facto ruler in the Gaza Strip. The takeover by Hamas prompted a blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt and set the stage for the next decade and a half of continued unrest.
The October 7, 2023, attack
The assaulMore than 240 others were taken into the Gaza Strip as hostages. Many of them were taken from their homes and some from the music festival. Including Israelis with dual citizenship, more than half of those taken hostage collectively held passports from about two dozen countries, effectively pulling several countries into the efforts to release their citizens.began about 6:30 am with a barrage of at least 2,200 rockets launched into Israel in just 20 minutes. During that opening salvo, Hamas used more than half the total number of rockets launched from Gaza during all of 2021’s 11-day conflict. The barrage reportedly overwhelmed the Iron Dome system, the highly successful antimissile defense system deployed throughout Israel, although the IDF did not specify how many missiles penetrated the system. As the rockets rained down on Israel, at least 1,500 militants from Hamas and the PIJ infiltrated Israel at dozens of points by using explosives and bulldozers to breach the border, which was heavily fortified with smart technology, fencing, and concrete. They disabled communication networks for several of the Israeli military posts nearby, allowing them to attack those installations and enter civilian neighborhoods undetected. Militants simultaneously breached the maritime border by motorboat near the coastal town of Zikim. Others crossed into Israel on motorized paragliders.
About 1,200 people were killed in the assault, which included families attacked in their homes in kibbutzim and attendees of an outdoor music festival. That number largely comprised Israeli civilians but also included foreign nationals. A March 2024 United Nations report found evidence that some were victims of sexual violence before they were killed. Adding to the trauma was the fact that it was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
December 2023–January 2024: pressure mounts for a ceasefire
By year’s end international pressure weighed heavily on Israel amid the high number of civilian casualties and wide destruction in the Gaza Strip. In mid-December U.S. Pres. Joe Biden, during a fundraising event for his reelection campaign, said that Israel was beginning to lose international support. In early January 2024, after nearly 23,000 Palestinians had been reported dead (a number that included mostly civilians but also Hamas fighters), Israel announced a change in strategy that would result in a more targeted approach. By the end of January the average number of daily deaths was one-third of what it had been in October but was still more than three times that of the 2014 conflict, the deadliest in the Gaza Strip until 2023. (By late July, the number of Palestinians reported dead approached 40,000.)
In late January a framework emerged through the mediation of Qatar, Egypt, and the United States for a potential three-phase pause in fighting during which a comprehensive agreement to end the war would be negotiated. The pause would include the release, in stages, of hostages held in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian prisoners taken by Israel since the start of the conflict. But the framework remained elusive as Hamas insisted on guarantees that the hostage exchange would lead to a permanent ceasefire.
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