Who are Gaza's civilians? Inside Gazan identity, Hamas ties - opinion

A year has passed since an estimated 2,500 Gaza civilians followed in the footsteps of the Hamas Nukhba units that broke through the Gaza security barrier, and ransacked and decimated a dozen Jewish border communities. 

Some assisted the Hamas terrorists by pointing out specific homes, while others looted.

Several dozen had themselves photographed joyfully celebrating the day’s victory by standing on burning tanks and at ripped open fences, smiling with their fingers in the V-sign held high. 

Multiple video clips display their actions, including one old Arab limping on his cane as he enters the back gate of the kibbutz.

Many hundreds more joyfully greeted the returning Hamas terrorists with live or dead hostages on their trucks, cars and motorbikes. 

They shouted and cheered and several are pictured stomping on dead Israelis as well as hitting and spitting at the hostages.

Ironically, despite the expulsion of all Israelis from Gaza in 2005, tens of thousands of Gaza civilians had been in contact with Israelis, mainly due to the effort Israel made to provide employment in Israel so as to wean Gazans from terror.

Some 50,000 others, according to a CNN report, had benefited from the Israeli Road to Recovery NGO whose volunteers, many from the Gaza border communities, transported sick Gazans into Israel for medical treatment. 

Founded in 2011, it had 1,300 volunteers and was helping about 140 patients a day before the war. 

Oded Lifshitz (84) and his wife Yocheved (86), among the founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz, were two of its volunteers. 

They were taken hostage on October 7, 2023: Yocheved was released two weeks later, but Oded is still being held captive after more than a year.

Another volunteer was Vivian Silver who co-founded Women Wage Peace and who had been a B’Tselem board member. She also transported Gazans requiring medical care in Israel with Project Rozana.

Silver was incinerated to death in her home in Be’eri.

A complex relationship 

JEWS AND Arabs have had a complex relationship over the past century and a half.

Jews returned to Gaza in 1886, at the initiative of Zev Klonimus Wissotzky, a leader of the Hovevei Zion movement (Lovers of Zion), who invested in economic ventures in Gaza, Nablus (Shechem) and Lod.

Jews had lived in Gaza during the biblical period, Hasmonean times and in the Byzantine era. The Crusader kingdom virtually wiped out that presence. 

After once again becoming a center of commerce, agriculture and mysticism in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman period stagnation set in.

During World War I, Jews in Gaza were subjected to Ottoman oppression and many were banished due to their foreign citizenship. 

The Margolin family were the first to return and 54 Jews were registered as residing there in the 1922 British census. In the larger Gaza Sub-District there were 830 Jews. Then came the watershed year of 1929.

Arabs from Gaza, many of them agricultural workers employed in many of the kibbutzim and moshavim in the South, participated in the killings of Jews in the 1929 riots. 

Thanks to the two Jewish wives of British policemen serving in Gaza, a rescue convoy was organized and the Jews of Gaza successfully escaped.

On August 26, 1929, Arabs from Gaza, some who were employed in the agricultural fields and orchards of Be’er Tuvia, participated in the attack on the moshav. 

Binyamin Tzvi Rosen, who had hidden in the synagogue, was beaten and stabbed to death, then disemboweled and afterwards, rolled up into Torah scrolls and set afire.

Throughout the period of the 1936-1939 disturbances, many dozens of shooting, bomb throwing and other terror incidents were carried out against both nearby Jewish communities and the British mandatory authorities.

Gaza Arabs participated in the attacks of Western Negev kibbutzim as well as Kfar Darom, which was founded in 1946 on land purchased by Jews in the early 1930s in Deir Al-Balah.

Throughout the 1950s, Gaza’s civilians had the opportunity to participate in the Fedayeen terror operations. Following 1967, terror re-emerged in earnest.

THE FIELD of biopolitics investigates how political power shapes the behaviors of whole populations through diverse strategies and controls. Gaza, however, acts in the reverse: The politics of the location is influenced by the demographic makeup of the Gaza Strip.

The current population of Gaza is estimated at two million. More importantly, more than 70% of that population is defined as refugees of Palestine. In other words, the “native” Gaza population is a small minority. The refugees cared for by UNRWA make up almost three-fourths (74%) of the current population of Gaza.

A 1988 study found that in 1948 Arabs, from some 144 cities, towns, and villages came to Gaza. The area’s population tripled by 1950 with 42% originating from the Lydda District and more than 50% from areas surrounding what became the Gaza Strip.

These now “refugees,” their identity maintained through food handouts, schools and summer camps, all overseen by Hamas, were indoctrinated that they are “foreign” to where they live. 

Add to this the high rate of under-18 year olds, who are most prone to be attracted to violent behavior patterns, and the result is a constant wave of Hamas reinforcements.

To that reality, and taking into consideration the history outlined above regarding Gaza’s violent reactions to the Jewish resettlement enterprise of the last 120 years, the mantra of “Gaza’s civilians” and “Gaza’s non-combatants” must be reappraised. 

The role of many “do-gooders” – from UNRWA to the Friends Committee and other European groups, aiding these “civilians” – must also be rethought.

Who supplies the manpower for the terrorist organizations? Who supports them? Who allows them access to schools, mosques and playgrounds wherein recruitment is done, where exercises are practiced, where radical Islamism is preached and where arms are stored and from where they are fired off?

Who gets the benefits? 

Who benefits from their sons being recruited into Hamas? Who gets food supplies before any other Gazan civilian?

This analysis is not suggesting that everyone in Gaza should be declassified as a “civilian,” but I do think that another review of the identity of Gaza’s “civilian” population is required.

The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.