Israel-Gaza Conflict: What You Need to Know

As the fighting enters its second week, it is being defined by civilian casualties, undiminished rocket fire and airstrikes, and by historical tensions erupting into unrest.

As Palestinians and Israelis hunkered down for the second week of an intense conflict, a series of deadly flash points have galvanized both sides in a region where the human cost of war is all too familiar.

Before dawn on Monday, Israeli warplanes bombarded Gaza City, compounding the civilian suffering in the coastal enclave. At the same time, the rocket barrage by Hamas — the militant group that has ruled Gaza since 2007 and does not recognize Israel — continued to take its toll on Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, the commercial center of the country.

As the civilian casualties grow, the conflict has polarized Israeli society, and the world, like seldom before, and it has spurred unrest within Israel and the occupied territories that has been more intense than any in years.

Who is being killed?

Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages on Gaza, an impoverished and densely packed enclave of two million people, have killed at least 212 Palestinians, including 61 children, between May 10 and Monday evening, producing stark images of destruction that have reverberated around the world.

In the other direction, Hamas missiles have rained over Israeli towns and cities, sowing fear and killing at least 10 people in Israel, including two children — a greater civilian toll within Israel than during the last war, in 2014, which lasted more than seven weeks.

Israeli strategists and representatives describe the Gaza campaign as being aimed at destroying as much of Hamas’s infrastructure as possible, including the group’s network of rocket factories and underground tunnels — a subterranean transit system that the Israel military refers to as “the metro.”

But Israel has come under increasing international criticism for the growing number of children that have been killed in airstrikes on Gaza. Images of children’s bodies have circulated on social media in recent days, along with the video of a bereft Gaza father comforting his wailing infant — the only one of his five children to survive an Israeli airstrike. Among the deaths have been eight children killed in a single airstrike at a refugee camp.

On the Israeli side, one of the children killed was a 5-year-old Israeli boy who died after a rocket fired from Gaza made a direct hit on the building next door to his aunt’s apartment, where he was visiting with his mother and older sister.

Some people have been hurt or killed in a burst of unrest in mixed-population cities in Israel, including in Lod, where two people died. And in the occupied West Bank, at least 20 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces over the past week.

How did the current conflict start?

The conflict erupted a week ago, on May 10, when weeks of simmering tensions in Jerusalem among Palestinian protesters, the police and right-wing Israelis escalated, against the backdrop of a longstanding battle for control of a city sacred to Jews, Arabs and Christians.

The root of the latest violence is an intense dispute over East Jerusalem, which is predominantly Palestinian. Protests had gone on for days ahead of a Supreme Court ruling, originally expected on May 10 but then postponed, on the eviction of several Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. Israeli officials described it as a dispute over real estate. Many Arabs called it part of a wider Israeli campaign to force Palestinians out of the city, describing it as ethnic cleansing.

The protests sharply intensified after Israeli police prevented Palestinians from gathering near one of the Old City’s ancient gates, as they have customarily done during the holy month of Ramadan. The police responded on May 10 by raiding the Aqsa Mosque compound, one of Islam’s holiest sites, to keep Palestinian protesters from throwing stones, they said. Hundreds of Palestinians and a score of police officers were wounded in the skirmish.

What kind of arsenal does Hamas have?

Despite Israel’s surveillance capability and overwhelming military firepower next door, Palestinian militants in Gaza have managed to amass a large arsenal of rockets with enhanced range in the 16 years since Israel vacated the coastal enclave, which it had occupied after the 1967 war.

Hamas, with help from allies outside Gaza — including Iran, according to Israeli and Hamas officials — has parlayed that arsenal into an increasingly lethal threat. Since the conflict erupted last week, Hamas has launched more than 3,000 rockets toward Israeli cities and towns. The intensity of the barrages has put the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, among others, under greater threat than in previous conflicts.

Image