Has Israel occupied Gaza for decades?

“Israel has occupied Gaza for decades.”

Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005, uprooting 21 settlements. From then until the current war, no Israeli forces governed inside the Strip; Hamas seized it by force in 2007 and ran it. Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade afterward. Whether that blockade legally amounts to “occupation” is genuinely argued, the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion says yes, Israel and others say no, but the image of Israeli troops ruling Gaza’s streets for decades is simply not what happened. And the blockade exists for the one reason the slogan skips: to stop weapons reaching a terror army by sea and land. That points to the answer nobody on the other side will say out loud, eliminate Hamas and the justification for the blockade disappears with it. A Gaza without a rocket-army has no need of one.

Where the claim comes from

“Decades of occupation” hardened into a fixed slogan after the 2005 withdrawal, precisely because the pullout complicated the older, simpler version of the claim. Before 2005 the word needed no argument: Israel held Gaza directly from 1967, and even after the 1993 Oslo Accords carved out Palestinian self-rule zones, Israeli troops and settlements remained inside the Strip. Once the settlers and soldiers left, human rights bodies needing a legal theory that survived the withdrawal shifted to an “effective control” argument: because Israel still regulated Gaza’s airspace, coastline, and most land crossings, the occupation continued in law even without a soldier on Gazan soil. That is the version pressed by UN Special Rapporteurs such as Francesca Albanese and repeated in Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reporting through the 2010s, and it hardened further once the 2007 Hamas takeover triggered an Israeli-Egyptian blockade that critics attributed to Israel alone.

The record

On 15 August 2005, under Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan, Israel evacuated all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza, roughly 8,000 settlers, and withdrew its last soldier by 12 September, dismantling the military government it had run there for 38 years. Palestinians held legislative elections in January 2006, which Hamas won outright. The resulting Fatah-Hamas unity government collapsed within a year, and in a violent week in June 2007, Hamas gunmen threw Fatah officials from rooftops and seized every Palestinian Authority security installation in the Strip, killing more than 100 people in the fighting. From that week forward, Gaza was governed, policed, taxed, and armed by Hamas, not Israel. It ran the courts, the schools, the ministries, and its own security service, and it built the tunnel network and rocket arsenal used to launch three wars against Israel between 2008 and 2014 and the invasion of 7 October 2023. Israel and Egypt tightened the border and maritime blockade after the 2007 coup for one stated purpose: stopping weapons shipments by land and sea. Goods, fuel, and aid still crossed at Israeli-controlled terminals under inspection throughout the period, at volumes that rose and fell with the security situation, including during the 2018-19 Great March of Return protests along the perimeter fence.

Who makes this argument today

The phrase is standard vocabulary in UN human-rights reporting and in advocacy from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and it surged in protest and campus rhetoric after the war that began 7 October 2023. It also sits at the center of the international law argument behind South Africa’s genocide case against Israel and the ICJ’s 19 July 2024 advisory opinion, which held that Israel’s continuing control over Gaza’s borders, airspace, and territorial waters meant the Strip remained occupied territory under the Court’s reading of the law, a non-binding opinion Israel and the United States both reject.

The “effective control” theory, and the eighteen years it can’t erase

Fairly stated: Israel plainly regulated who and what crossed into Gaza, and it reoccupied significant ground inside the Strip during the current war; whether perimeter control without a governing presence on the ground meets the legal definition of occupation is a real, unresolved dispute among international lawyers, one the ICJ’s 2024 opinion answered but Israel and the United States reject.

That legal argument does not touch the eighteen years the slogan erases. From 2005 to 2023, no Israeli soldier patrolled a Gaza street and no Israeli official ran a Gaza ministry. The entity that did both, for all eighteen of those years, was Hamas.

Eighteen years of Hamas rule the slogan erases

The blockade was real, and Israel and Egypt built it for one reason: to stop weapons reaching a terror army by sea and land. The misleading part is “decades of occupation.” Israel pulled every soldier and settler out in 2005, and for eighteen straight years, from 2007 until this war, Hamas governed, armed and taxed Gaza. Not Israel.