Was Gaza occupied when this war began?

No. On September 12, 2005, the last Israeli soldier drove out of the Gaza Strip and the gate closed behind him. Israel had just uprooted 21 of its own communities, about 8,500 people, demolished its own settlements, and exhumed its own dead to leave nothing behind. No Israeli soldier governed Gaza on October 6, 2023. What governed Gaza was Hamas, which had seized it from the Palestinian Authority by force in June 2007 and ruled it as a de facto state for sixteen years: army, police, courts, taxes, schools. The “occupied Gaza” framing survives because it is useful, not because it is true.

What Israel actually removed in 2005

The disengagement was not a gesture. It was a full, unilateral evacuation, announced by prime minister Ariel Sharon in December 2003, approved by the Knesset on February 16, 2005, upheld by Israel’s Supreme Court against twelve petitions on June 9, 2005, and executed that August.

The numbers: 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four more in the northern West Bank. About 1,700 families, roughly 8,500 residents, some of them third-generation, dragged from their homes by Israeli soldiers, at a compensation cost near 900 million dollars. The evacuation of civilians ran from August 17 to August 22, 2005; it went so fast because most left under protest, not under fire. 47 graves were opened and the dead reburied inside Israel, because a state that intended to return does not exhume its cemeteries. Synagogues were dismantled or abandoned. The settlers’ greenhouses, a working export industry that produced some 120 million dollars a year in flowers and produce, were bought for the Palestinians by international donors; they were looted within days of the handover.

By mid-September 2005 there was not one Israeli soldier, settler, or civilian administrator in the Strip. Whatever Gaza became after that date, it became under Palestinian rule.

What Gaza did with the test run

Disengagement was the first live experiment in full Palestinian self-rule. The answer came fast and it came by air. Human Rights Watch, no friend of Israeli policy, counted almost 2,700 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel between September 2005 and May 2007, killing four Israeli civilians and wounding dozens, and called the attacks unlawful and indiscriminate. Sderot, a working-class town inside sovereign Israel, not a settlement, lived under a fifteen-second warning clock. The rocket war, and who started each round of it, predates the blockade, not the other way around.

Then came the coup. Hamas won the January 2006 Palestinian legislative election; in June 2007 it settled the question of power with guns, routing Fatah in about a week of street fighting that killed more than 160 Palestinians. Fatah men were shot in hospitals and thrown from rooftops; Mahmoud Abbas called it a coup and his Palestinian Authority has never set foot in Gaza since. From June 2007 to October 2023, one government ruled the Strip, and it was not Israel.

The blockade: whose it was, and what the UN found

After the coup, Israel and Egypt jointly restricted their borders with a territory now run by an organization whose 1988 charter calls for their destruction and for the killing of Jews. That word “jointly” is the one the slogan always drops: Gaza has two neighbors, and Egypt kept Rafah, the crossing Israel does not touch, largely sealed for years for the same security reasons.

The legality question was put to the United Nations itself. After the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, the Secretary-General’s Panel of Inquiry, the Palmer Report of September 2011, concluded that the naval blockade “was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.” The same report criticized the boarding raid’s use of force as excessive, and an honest account says so. But the headline finding stands: the UN’s own inquiry ruled the blockade lawful, a fact almost never quoted by the people who call it a siege.

”Open-air prison”: who ran daily life inside

The prison metaphor requires a warden, and the warden of daily life in Gaza was Hamas. It collected taxes, licensed businesses, ran the schools and courts, policed the streets with tens of thousands of armed men, and decided how to spend the concrete and the cash. What it built with them was not shelters for civilians but an estimated hundreds of kilometers of attack tunnels and an arsenal that fired over four thousand rockets in the 2021 round alone.

And the prison had a paycheck window. On the eve of October 7, roughly 18,000 to 18,500 Gazans held Israeli work permits, crossing daily through Erez into the country they were supposedly imprisoned by, injecting an estimated two million dollars a day into Gaza’s economy. Around 500 trucks of goods a day moved through Kerem Shalom, Qatari cash arrived monthly in suitcases with Israel’s consent, and Israeli hospitals treated thousands of Gazan patients a year. That easing was a deliberate policy of the government that October 7 shattered, and whether it was wise is a genuinely open question. Whether it describes a prison is not. Some of the permit workers, it later emerged, mapped the kibbutzim they worked in for the attackers.

The “still occupied” argument at its strongest, and why it fails

The serious version of the claim does not pretend Israeli soldiers were in Gaza. It argues “effective control”: Israel controlled Gaza’s airspace, its sea approaches, most land crossings, and the population registry, so under a stretched reading of occupation law it remained the occupier. The UN and the ICRC have taken versions of this position, and the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion held that Israel retained obligations “commensurate with the degree” of its control. That is the argument at its strongest, and it deserves stating.

It still strains against the legal text and the ground truth. The 1907 Hague Regulations define territory as occupied when it “is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army,” and belligerent occupation has always meant boots on the ground exercising governmental authority in place of the local sovereign. In Gaza there were no boots, no military governor, no Israeli administration, and a hostile government fielding its own army of roughly 30,000 fighters. A doctrine under which perimeter control equals occupation would make Egypt an occupier of Gaza too, which its proponents never argue, and it collapses the moment you ask the practical question the companion claim page asks: occupied territories do not launch six wars and 20,000 rockets at their supposed occupier. The occupied-versus-disputed distinction is argued in good faith about the West Bank. About post-2005 Gaza, “occupied” was a slogan doing legal cosplay, deployed to relabel a war Hamas started on October 7 as resistance to a condition that had ended eighteen years earlier.

Has Israel occupied Gaza for decades? · Was the pre-October 7 policy toward Hamas defensible at the time? · Who attacked first in the Gaza wars · Was Gaza ever a Jewish city? · The fact-checks on the main site · The History They Skip

Sources

From Asked & answered on the main site.