Who attacked first in the Gaza wars?

2008 · 2012 · 2014 · 2021 · The Gaza rounds

Between 2005 and 2021, Israel and Hamas fought four rounds of open war over the Gaza Strip, and every one of them opened with rocket fire or a cross-border attack launched from Gaza. Israel had already withdrawn every soldier, settler and settlement from the territory in 2005, dismantling twenty-one communities and removing roughly 8,600 Israelis by force where they refused to leave voluntarily. What followed was not peace but an arms buildup: Hamas seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a week of internal fighting in June 2007, and rocket and mortar fire that had already begun before the takeover accelerated after it. The four wars that followed, in 2008 to 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021, form the clearest test case in the conflict of who starts these rounds, because the buffer of “occupation” that explains earlier wars does not apply here: Israel held no territory inside Gaza after 2005.

Background: withdrawal, takeover, blockade

Israel’s disengagement plan, drafted under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and completed in September 2005, ended thirty-eight years of Israeli presence in Gaza. It was framed as a step that might open a path to Palestinian self-government without Israeli control. Instead, Hamas used the vacuum to build a military infrastructure: rocket production, smuggling tunnels under the Egyptian border, and fortified launch sites embedded in civilian neighborhoods. After Hamas’s violent takeover in 2007, Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on the Strip, citing the smuggling of weapons and rocket components; Hamas and its allies have cited the blockade ever since as justification for the rocket fire that in fact began years before it. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller but equally armed faction backed directly by Iran, has fought alongside Hamas in every round since.

2008 to 2009: Operation Cast Lead

A six-month ceasefire, brokered by Egypt in June 2008, collapsed that November after an Israeli raid on a cross-border tunnel Israel said was being dug to abduct soldiers, a fact this page does not hide. Hamas declared the truce over and, through December, fired dozens of rockets and mortars a day into southern Israel. On 27 December 2008, after weeks of sustained fire, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a three-week air and ground campaign that ended in January 2009. Thirteen Israelis were killed, including three civilians and several soldiers to friendly fire. Israel’s own count put Palestinian deaths at just over 1,100, most of them fighters by its accounting; Hamas and Gaza’s health ministry gave a higher, less-verifiable total near 1,400. Both figures are contested to this day, and this page states that plainly rather than pick the number that flatters either side. See the 2008 to 2009 Gaza war for the fuller record.

2012: Operation Pillar of Defense

Days of intensifying rocket and anti-tank fire from Gaza in November 2012 preceded Israel’s strike on Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’s military chief, on 14 November, the operation’s opening move and its trigger in the eyes of most accounts. Over the eight days that followed, Palestinian factions fired more than 1,500 rockets at Israel, of which 933 struck inside Israeli territory and 421 were intercepted by the newly operational Iron Dome system, then in just its second year of service. Six Israelis were killed. Roughly 160 Palestinians died in the Israeli response, a mix of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters and, by most independent counts, a substantial number of civilians. A ceasefire, again brokered by Egypt, ended the round on 21 November 2012.

2014: Operation Protective Edge

On 12 June 2014, a Hamas cell kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers hitchhiking in the West Bank, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach. Israel’s search operation and arrests in the West Bank were followed by a sharp rise in rocket fire from Gaza; Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on 8 July 2014. It became the longest and deadliest of the four rounds: fifty days of fighting, including a ground invasion aimed at destroying the cross-border tunnel network Hamas had built to stage attacks inside Israel. Sixty-seven Israelis were killed, sixty-four of them soldiers, alongside more than 2,300 rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities. Palestinian deaths totaled roughly 2,100; Israel’s military said close to half were combatants, a claim independent monitors and the UN disputed, putting the civilian share considerably higher. The casualties of the Gaza war are examined in more depth on their own page, including how each side’s counting methods differ.

2021: Operation Guardian of the Walls

The fourth round broke from the pattern of the first three only in its immediate trigger: weeks of unrest in Jerusalem over Sheikh Jarrah eviction proceedings and clashes at al-Aqsa gave Hamas a pretext to act well outside Gaza’s own borders. On 10 May 2021, Hamas fired rockets directly at Jerusalem, a city it had never targeted in any previous round, and Israel responded with eleven days of strikes that ended on 21 May. More than 4,300 rockets were fired at Israel, over ninety percent of those aimed at populated areas intercepted by Iron Dome; roughly a dozen Israelis were killed. Palestinian deaths, as reported by Gaza’s health ministry, ran to around 250, a toll Israel says included well over a hundred combatants. This round sits alongside the Great March of Return protests of 2018 to 2019 as part of the same post-blockade pattern: organized pressure on the border and inside Israel itself, met by an Israeli military response.

The pattern, and how it gets misrepresented today

Across sixteen years and four wars, the sequence never reverses: rockets or a cross-border raid from Gaza, then an Israeli operation. What changes between rounds is only how the fire is framed once it starts. Coverage in each round has tended to lead with Israeli strikes and Palestinian casualty counts, and to treat the rocket fire that preceded them as background context rather than the war’s actual opening act, the same asymmetry documented across the broader conflict. The blockade is frequently cited as Gaza’s grievance and Israel’s motive, when the chronology runs the other way: rocket fire preceded the blockade by years, and the blockade followed Hamas’s armed takeover and continued arms buildup, not the reverse. Who started the wars, asked across the whole conflict rather than one round at a time, finds the same answer here that it finds nearly everywhere else. For the fuller count of who has died across these rounds and the current war, see how many people have died in Gaza. What none of the four rounds required for Hamas to open fire was Israeli territory, Israeli settlers or an Israeli soldier anywhere inside Gaza. The history of Gaza before 2005 shows a strip of land Israel had already left; the wars fought over it since were fought over what came after, not what came before. The pattern repeated one final time on 7 October 2023, the fifth and by far the deadliest round, examined on its own page.

Who attacked first, every war · The History They Skip · Who attacked first on October 7 · The 2008-2009 Gaza War · How many people have died in Gaza · Hamas

Sources

From Who attacked first on the main site.