African Art

2014 Gaza War

The 2014 Gaza War, also known as Operation Protective Edge (Hebrew: מִבְצָע צוּק אֵיתָן, romanized: Miv'tza Tzuk Eitan, lit. 'Operation Strong Cliff'), and Battle of the Withered Grain (Arabic: معركة العصف المأكول, romanized: Maʿrakat al-ʿAṣf al-Maʾkūl), was a military operation launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory governed by Hamas since 2007 and which was occupied by Israel since 1967 until its disengagement in 2005. Following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Palestinian militants, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initiated Operation Brother's Keeper, in which it killed 10 Palestinians, injured 130 and imprisoned more than 600. Hamas reportedly did not retaliate but resumed rocket attacks on Israel more than two weeks later, following the killing of one of its militants by an Israeli airstrike on 29 June. This escalation triggered a seven-week-long conflict between the two sides, one of the deadliest outbreaks of open conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in decades. The war resulted in over two thousand deaths, the vast majority of which were Gazan Palestinian civilians. This includes a total of six Israeli civilians who were killed as a result of the conflict. The Israeli military operation aimed to stop rocket fire into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Conversely, Hamas' attacks aimed to bring international pressure onto Israel with the strategic goal of forcing the latter to lift the naval and air blockade of the Gaza Strip; among its other goals were to end Israel's attacks on Palestinians, obtain a third party to monitor and guarantee compliance with a ceasefire, release Palestinian political prisoners and overcome its isolation. According to the BBC, Israel launched airstrikes on the Gaza Strip in retaliation to the rocket attacks by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other Palestinian militant groups. On 7 July, after seven Hamas militants died in a tunnel explosion in Khan Yunis that was caused either by an Israeli airstrike (per Hamas, Nathan Thrall, BBC, and a senior IDF official) or an accidental explosion of their own munitions (per the IDF), Hamas assumed responsibility for rockets fired into Israel, and subsequently launched 40 more rockets towards Israel.

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• ▸1826
• ▸Fire hose
• ▸List of awards and nominations received by Michael Jackson

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.