At around 6:00 AM on Saturday October 7, a militant group based in Gaza known as Hamas breached security measures and launched an assault against Israel. 700 Israelis were killed and 2,243 injured, as well as 413 Palestinians killed and 2,300 injured, according to the New York Times. 

The attack began with rockets fired from Gaza and Hamas paragliders and ground forces going into Israel after blowing up sections of the border wall between Gaza and Israel. Hamas also targeted cell towers to knock out communications. It took Israel several hours to respond to the attacks. 

During the attacks, Hamas stormed border buildings, many villages along the Gaza border, and a music festival that was in progress as they began to attack. They took several hostages and murdered countless others. After Israeli forces responded to the attacks, President Benjamin Netanyahu sent out a statement stating that the country was at war against Hamas. 

In that statement, he also said that he had called on reserve forces to retaliate against the attacks. In the past week since the attack, Israel had called on 300,000 reservists from the IDF (Israeli Defense Force, which is their army) that were all around the world to come back and help. Airstrikes have also been going on in Gaza for the past week, and the Israeli government has called for an evacuation of part of the Gaza Strip as it readies for “a complete siege” of Gaza. 

The United Nations Attorney General responded to the call for a complete siege by saying “I am deeply distressed by today’s announcement that Israel will initiate a complete siege of the Gaza Strip, nothing allowed in — no electricity, food, or fuel.”

Israeli retaliations have already killed hundreds in the days since the attacks and this siege is predicted to have devastating effects on those in Gaza. Families are also having trouble leaving Gaza because the border crossings in and out have all mostly been closed. There is only one border that remains open and that is the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, although it has been closed for the past few days due to an explosion.

 This attack on Israel by Hamas might be new, but the conflict that is behind the attack goes back decades to before the first World War. The area that is home to Israel in the modern day was home to Palestinians for centuries before WWI. They were known as Arabs even though they had grown a distinct identity by that point and most Palestinians living in Palestine at the time were majority Muslim, but some were also Jewish and Christian. 

By the start of the war, there were mostly two groups looking to control Palestine: The Arabs, who wanted to break from the Ottoman Empire in hopes of starting a new Arab state, and the Zionists, who wanted Palestine to be a Jewish state since the state of Jewish people in Europe was increasingly brutal due to growing antisemitism. 

However, the British also began to see Palestine as a key place to help them expand their trade routes and grow their sphere of influence. In 1916, the British exchanged letters with an Arab leader and promised them a new state if they helped Britain and rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. However,  after the Arabs did their part to help the British, Britain turned around and betrayed them in 1917 and made the Balford Accords with the Zionists, saying they would help them create a Jewish state. 

Due to that agreement, Jewish immigration increased rapidly after WWI, and this caused rebellions between Palestinians and Jews over land. Britain trained the Zionists to fight but the rebellions continued. 

As a result, Britain limited Jewish immigration to try and calm the conflict, but this angered Zionist extremists. Britain finally decided to leave Palestine in 1947 and left the newly formed United Nations with the task of addressing Palestine. 

The U.N. came up with the Partition Plan of 1947, which gave over half the land to the Jewish state, which the Palestinians then rejected, as they still made up most of the population when compared to Jews. Before the U.N plan took effect, Zionist paramilitary forces adopted Plan Dala on March 10, 1948. This plan called for the destruction of Arab villages and other Arab populations that were difficult to control. It called for the population to be “expelled outside the border of the state,” villages emptied and for control along main hubs of transportation. 

During the operation, people were slaughtered, and many villages were decimated. Afterwards, Zionist used what happened as a tool to scare people away and it led to Palestinians fleeing as a result. Plan Dala also allowed them to take territory away from Palestinians and on May 14, 1948, Zionists declared the state of Israel. A lot of neighboring states declared war on Israel due to the influx of Palestinian immigrants, but they lost, all while Palestinians continued to be killed. 

Plan Dala and what followed would become known as the Nakba. 15,000 people were killed and 750,000 were forced to flee. After the Nakba, Israel got 78 percent of the land even though it was only allotted 56 percent under the U.N plan. Only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were left to the Palestinians. The assault that happened in Israel on October 7 is a continuation of this conflict and where it leads is yet to be determined.