Israel withdraws from Gaza three times

Israel has taken the Gaza Strip three times and later withdrawn. Internal conflicts have repeatedly prevented Palestinian leadership from controlling its own territory. Initially, Egypt and Jordan fought over dominance of the Palestinian areas, and since 2007, the conflict between Hamas and the PLO has once again divided the territories in two.

Sedan Israel drog sig tillbaka från Gaza år 2005 har det avfyrats tiotusentals missiler mot Israel från den lilla landremsan vid Medelhavet. Foto: IDF

Gaza was occupied during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967. The most recent withdrawal occurred when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon handed over Gaza in 2005 to avoid international pressure on Israel to reach a political settlement with the Palestinians. All Israelis were forced to leave, and their homes were demolished when over 8,000 Jewish residents from 21 communities in the Gaza Strip were forcibly removed. No Jews were allowed to live in Gaza, in contrast to the approximately two million Arabs who are Israeli citizens today.
After Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Gaza was ruled for nearly two decades by Egypt. The ceasefire reached in early 1949 meant that Israel withdrew from the Sinai and Gaza, which were handed over to Egypt.
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was not interested in granting national rights to the Palestinians and did not see them as a distinct nation deserving of their own state, but rather as an integrated part of a future unified Arab state.
In the mid-1950s, Nasser told a Western journalist, “The Palestinians are useful for the Arab states as they are… Can you imagine another nation on the eastern Mediterranean coast?” wrote Efraim Karsh, a British-Israeli history professor at King’s College London, in the Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2014).

The first attempts to form a Palestinian government took place during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The ‘government’ established to rule the then Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip was entirely subordinate to Egypt. It was recognized by the Arab League and six of its then seven members, but not by Transjordan.
The president of what came to be called the Gaza Strip was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a former Waffen-SS officer who collaborated with Hitler during World War II.
In October 1948, Amin al-Husseini declared independence for all of “Palestine,” but Transjordan’s King Abdullah opposed the decision and annexed Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).
In June 1959, Gamal Abdel Nasser officially dissolved the Palestinian government, arguing that it had failed.
At the founding of the PLO in Egypt in 1964 — later led by Cairo-born Yasser Arafat — its goal was to ‘liberate’ Israel, despite the fact that at that time Israel had no control over the West Bank (occupied by Jordan) or Gaza (occupied by Egypt). A phased plan involving partial liberation through armed struggle did not exclude diplomatic compromises (such as the Oslo Accords) on the way to the ultimate goal of “completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory.”

The 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel mentioned a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but Jordan did not relinquish its claims to the West Bank until July 1988. The Oslo Accords later granted Palestinians self-rule in Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
The agreement stipulated that the PLO would renounce all acts of violence and terrorism and that the Israeli military would withdraw from parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas has carried out numerous terrorist attacks from the territory, culminating in the massacre on October 7, 2023, which was marked by indiscriminate killings—the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and the bloodiest day in Israel’s modern history. Three thousand missiles were launched from Gaza within the first 24 hours.
The Oslo Accords also stated that democratic elections would be held in the Palestinian territories and that the West Bank and Gaza Strip would remain a single territorial unit. None of these conditions have been fulfilled to date. No democratic elections have been held in these areas since 2006 when Hamas took control of Gaza and the PLO was elected in the West Bank. The conflict between Hamas and the PLO has further divided the Palestinian territories into two completely separate entities.