Gaza Strip

The Gaza Strip is a 365 square kilometre (141 square mile) territory on the eastern Mediterranean coast, home to roughly two million Palestinians, bordered by Israel to the north and east and by Egypt to the south, and ruled since a violent 2007 coup by Hamas, a jihadist organization designated terrorist by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and others. Israel removed every soldier and every one of its 21 settlements from the Strip in 2005. Gaza is the territory from which more than 20,000 rockets have been fired at Israeli towns, and from which Hamas launched the October 7, 2023 attacks, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. It is also a place of real and severe civilian suffering, which honest coverage reports alongside the cause of it.

Where and what it is

The Strip runs about 41 kilometres along the coast and is 6 to 12 kilometres wide. Its main cities are Gaza City in the north, Deir al-Balah in the centre, and Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south. Before the 2023 war its population was roughly 2.1 million, one of the densest in the world, though comparable to cities like Tel Aviv or London rather than uniquely so. The name is ancient: Gaza (Azza in Hebrew) is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, a Philistine harbour town millennia before the modern conflict, with a documented Jewish community through the Talmudic era and beyond, a history covered at Was Gaza ever a Jewish city?

How the “Strip” came to exist: 1948 to 1967

The Gaza Strip as a political unit is a product of the 1948 war. When Egypt invaded the new State of Israel in May 1948, its army held this coastal sliver at the armistice, and the 1949 armistice lines froze it in place, swollen with refugees from the war. What followed is the part the “decades of Israeli occupation” story skips: Egypt ruled Gaza for 19 years, from 1948 to 1967, and never made it Palestine. Cairo administered it under military governors, dissolved the nominal “All-Palestine Government” it had installed, denied its residents Egyptian citizenship, and used the territory as a base for fedayeen raids into Israel throughout the 1950s. No state called for a Palestinian state in Gaza during those 19 years.

Israeli control, Oslo, and the 2005 disengagement

Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in the Six-Day War of June 1967 and administered it for 38 years. Under the Oslo Accords of 1993 to 1995, day-to-day governance of most of the Strip passed to the new Palestinian Authority. Then, in August and September 2005, Israel carried out full unilateral disengagement: it withdrew every soldier, dismantled all 21 settlements, and removed about 8,500 Israeli civilians, some dragged from their homes by the IDF. Nothing remained of the Israeli presence. Greenhouses purchased for the Palestinians by donors were largely looted within weeks. The question of what Israel’s post-2005 status was, and whether “occupation” still described it, is treated honestly at Has Israel occupied Gaza for decades? and Was Gaza occupied when this war began?

Hamas rule: 2007 to the present

Hamas won the January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, and in June 2007 it seized sole control of Gaza by force, gunning down Fatah rivals and throwing some from rooftops. No election has been held since. In response to Hamas rule and rocket fire, both Israel and Egypt imposed closures on their borders with the Strip; a UN Secretary-General’s panel of inquiry (the Palmer Report, 2011) found Israel’s naval blockade a lawful security measure. What followed was a cycle of wars that Hamas initiated or escalated with rocket barrages and cross-border attacks: 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, each examined at Who attacked first in the Gaza wars? Throughout, Hamas diverted concrete and aid into a tunnel network estimated at hundreds of kilometres, embedded rocket launchers and command posts in homes, hospitals and UNRWA facilities, and spent on war what the territory needed for water and power.

On 7 October 2023, some 6,000 attackers from Gaza murdered about 1,200 people in southern Israel and dragged 251 hostages back into the Strip. The war Hamas started ended under a ceasefire in October 2025 with Gaza devastated: the IDF’s assessment of roughly 70,000 dead, about a third of them identified combatants, closely matches the Gaza Health Ministry’s count, figures weighed carefully at How many people have died in Gaza, and how many were combatants? The IPC declared famine conditions over in December 2025, and who governs Gaza next remains the open question of the post-war order, covered at What should come next?

The “open-air prison” frame

The label the reader meets in Wikipedia’s lead assembles a false picture from selective facts. Gaza has two land neighbours, and the southern border, Rafah, belongs to Egypt, which kept it closed or tightly restricted for most of the Hamas era for exactly the reason Israel restricted its own crossings: Hamas. A prison has no side run by a second, Arab, state. Before October 7, about 18,000 Gazans held permits to work in Israel at Israeli wages; during the war itself Israel facilitated thousands of aid trucks, a polio vaccination campaign that reached over 560,000 children, and field hospitals, none of which fits the metaphor. The frame also erases agency: Gaza’s rulers chose rockets and tunnels over ports and trade, and said so openly. The related starvation claims are examined at Is Israel deliberately starving Gaza?

The hard numbers from before the war tell the same story. On the CIA World Factbook’s 2021 estimates, Gaza’s infant mortality, 16 deaths per 1,000 live births, was lower than Egypt’s (17.3), Morocco’s (18.7), Iraq’s (19.2) and Yemen’s (45.5); life expectancy, 74.8 years, ran above Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Iraq. On the UN’s own Human Development Index for 2021, “State of Palestine” scored 0.715, ranked 106th, above Lebanon (112th), Iraq (121st), Syria (150th) and Yemen (183rd). None of this made pre-war Gaza prosperous, and the blockade’s costs are conceded below. But a territory that outranked half its neighbors on the UN’s own development index was not a concentration camp, and the people who called it one were not describing it; they were borrowing a word for its charge.

What cuts against Israel here, and why it isn’t the “prison” story

The record cuts against Israel in places. The closure regime imposed real costs on ordinary Gazans who never voted for Hamas, nobody under about 35 ever had the chance: chronic unemployment, undrinkable tap water, hours of electricity a day. The 2023-25 war destroyed or damaged a majority of Gaza’s housing stock, and tens of thousands of the dead were civilians, a catastrophe by any measure even where the law assigns responsibility to the side that embedded its army in their homes. Israel’s own pre-war policy failed too: for years Jerusalem allowed Qatari cash into Gaza on the theory that a funded Hamas was a deterred Hamas, a misjudgment Israeli inquiries have documented.

None of that is a concession to the “prison” frame. It is what separates an encyclopedia from a pamphlet: a closure regime with real human costs, run by a state fighting a war it did not start, against an enemy that spent the aid and cash it received on tunnels and rockets instead of the water and power its own people needed.

October 7 attacks · Hamas · Was Gaza occupied when this war began? · Who attacked first in the Gaza wars? · The Conflict, in full · Wikipedia & the Conflict: the audit

Sources

The live Wikipedia article, for comparison