Oasis Plan's Historical Primer, (5/5)

The Hamas offensive out of Gaza on October 7th, 2023, was a regional game-changer. Militants had conducted sorties into Israel on the scale of small raids in the past, but no ground assaults of the magnitude witnessed on that fateful day. It produced a shake-up in the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic, and as the ceasefire signed on October 9th, 2025, has collapsed, it appears that the hatchet is far from buried in the Middle East.

This is the sixth article in a septempartite series which presents Lyndon LaRouche’s Oasis Plan. The Oasis Plan seeks to end the conflict between Israel and its neighbors by incentivizing cooperation towards common goals amongst the regional countries. To contextualize the decisions now facing the statesmen as they evaluate the Plan, the pertinent regional history is recounted in five parts, of which this is the last. It is recommendable that you read this primer since it explains a key element to the Plan. Namely, it explains why there must exist a free and independent state of Palestine in some form if peace is to endure in the Middle East.

Placards before Swords

Ingrates at the Gates?

Through the policy of Disengagement in 2005, Israel officially claimed to vacate Gaza and leave it to its own devices. Though Israel intervened militarily in reprisal of attacks by Gazan militants, the last expedition – Operation Protective Edge, July 18th, 2014 – August 26th, 2014 – had been nine long years ago as counted from October 2023. Why then did certain Gazans suddenly organize October 7th’s assault through the gates into Israel? If Israel was officially leaving them alone, were those who rushed the gates on that morning mere ingrates?

Any judgments about “gratitude” must examine the situation on the ground at the time, and the situation in Gaza circa 2018 was bleak. Since 2007, Israel had imposed a hermetic blockade on Gaza by land, air and sea, which by 2015 had reduced Gaza’s economy by 50%. Israel allowed no supplies into Gaza which Israel believed could be used for militancy – what the literature terms items of “dual use” – so Israel issued a list of items banned for importation into Gaza which the World Bank criticized as excessive beyond international norms. Addition to and removal from the official list followed an opaque administrative process and reflected, in the World Bank’s judgment, economic sanctions against Palestinians rather than finite objectives against militancy.

The restriction on movement applied to people as well as goods. Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank generally could not leave their respective territories. The Israeli government authorized familial reunions only in cases of weddings and funerals. Exit permits otherwise were never granted unless certain exceptions could be made, such as working in international trade or rare humanitarian cases. Patients seeking medical treatment outside of Gaza had to apply for an exit permit long in advance, and approval was often not communicated to the patients until the night before the intended travel. Other times Shin Bet (Israel’s equivalent of the FBI) would condition exit permits on patients ratting on their relatives and neighbors, such that life-saving medical treatment could come at the cost of getting relatives black-bagged in pre-dawn raids.

By 2017, 53% of Gazans lived in poverty and had the world’s highest rate of unemployment at 54%, according to the World Bank. The IDF’s successive incursions into Gaza (Operations Cast Lead in 2008, Pillar of Defense in 2012 and Protective Edge in 2014) had eradicated well over 60% of Gaza’s housing stock, which meant greater numbers of people cramming together in what housing remained.

Against the mounting pressures on population and household budgets, drinking water had grown scarce and therefore expensive. The coastal aquifer which had supplied Gaza was overused and became overrun by seawater. Tap water was therefore unpotable, so 90% of Gazans had to purchase desalinated water in tanks or containers from private sector suppliers which charged as much as thirty times more than publicly piped water.

Another essential to modern life was electricity, which was supplied to Gaza only 5-6 hours daily on average in the first nine months of 2018, with all the consequent complications on food refrigeration, heating, lighting and cooking. In 2006, the IDF had destroyed Gaza’s power plant during Operation Summer Rains in retaliation for militant attacks on Israel, but in 2007 it was rebuilt though with less capacity for power generation. The reduced capacity – combined with the blockade’s exclusion of newer equipment and supplies – made Gaza’s waste-water treatment plant less able to process sewage, resulting in the expulsion of untreated sewage into the Mediterranean at a rate equivalent to 115 million liters daily by 2017. This led the RAND Corporation in 2018 to predict that an epidemic was imminent in Gaza. (p. ix) If nothing else, the situation proved prescient Israeli National Security Advisor Giora Eiland’s description of Gaza in 2004 as a “huge concentration camp.”

At the gates in peace

On January 7th, 2018, Palestinian journalist Ahmed Abu Artema proposed a mass demonstration to raise awareness about Israel’s ruinous blockade of Gaza and also the Right of Return. This is understood as Palestinians’ ability to reclaim realty which had belonged to them or their families after Israel evicted them during the Nakba in 1948. Stated differently, if a right of return through Zionism entitles a Jew born in Brooklyn to settle lands from which his ancestors were expelled 2,000 years ago, then a right of return also exists for Palestinians who were directly expelled from their homes 70 years ago.

The mass demonstration was to be called the Great March of Return (GMR). Several civic and political groups organized it, such as the National Commission to Break the Siege of Gaza and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Hamas had no role in the GMR’s organization, but its political wing arranged the buses for transportation, which was not untoward considering that it was the entity governing Gaza at the time. The GMR would converge all along the eastern security fence bordering Israel and bring their demands directly to the regime denying them.

The GMR was to rally at five campsites in each of Gaza’s governorates; Abu Safia in the north, Malaka east of Gaza City, El Bureij in the central strip, Khuzaa east of Khan Younis, and al-Shawkah as the southernmost, due east of Rafah. The campsites were erected 700m – 1000m from the security fence, which was well outside the Area of Restricted Access (ARA), a buffer zone of varying distances which the Israel Security Forces (ISF) surveils. The ISF refuses officially to demarcate the ARA’s varying contours, yet it snipes trespassers who unwittingly violate it. For example, between 2010 and 2017, 161 Palestinians were killed in the nebulous ARA, and 3,000 were wounded, amongst them farmers from whom the ARA deprives roughly 35% of Gaza’s arable farmland. In 2015, Hamas constructed the Jakkar Road running north to south just 200m – 300m from the security fence, so this is a general landmark which Gazans are never supposed to pass.

The GMR, however, proposed that they pass it. In an act of civil disobedience patterned after Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent raid on the Dharasana Salt Works on May 21st, 1930 (in defiance of the colonial insistence that Indians give their raw salt to the British so that they could process it for sale back to India), Ahmed Abu Artema suggested that the GMR at intervals move the campsites closer to the security fence, to demonstrate that Palestinians could coexist peacefully in closer proximity to Israelis.

On March 30th, 2018, tens of thousands of demonstrators rallied at the five campsites. March 30th was selected as the GMR’s start date to coincide with Palestinian Land Day, which commemorates six Palestinians killed in 1976 protesting expropriation of their lands in the West Bank. Initially the GMR’s mood was festive. There were picnics, concerts, dances and soccer. None of that mattered, though. The ISF saw fit to fire live at the protesters, killing 18 and wounding 703, the youngest casualty being a toddler shot in the head. The GMR thus realized that the world had changed for the worse since Gandhi’s civil disobedience in the 1930s.

The demonstration continued every Friday until December 31st, 2018, but it degenerated from its peaceful beginnings. The protesters began to burn piled tires around the campsites so as to screen the protesters from the snipers’ view. Increasingly there was stone-throwing at the ISF manning the security fence (many of whom were huddled within fortified berms or behind metallic barriers which made such projectiles harmless), and protesters flung tear gas canisters back at the ISF.

There were instances of “incendiary kites.” These were kites which the protesters would fly to which they would attach smoldering cinders netted together in chicken wire. When high enough, the kites’ strings would be severed, allowing the kites to waft over the security fence into Israel. Another variation was a kite or helium balloon trailing an improvised explosive device (IED) which would detonate upon landing. Both types of hazardous kites were sometimes mixed into “flocks” of regular kites, which bore only the image of Palestinian martyrs but trailed nothing harmful. Crude as they were, these incendiary and IED kites burnt 7,000 acres of land, including 1,200 acres of crops, with damage all told estimated at $20 million. And none of that accounts for the insecurity felt by Israelis being overflown by these airborne weapons.

It must also be said that Gazan militants – though they had been excluded from organizing the GMR – saw opportunity in the commotion. On Friday, July 20th, 2018, one such militant lethally sniped Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Sergeant Aviv Levi at the fence nearby Kibbutz Kissufim. Five days later, a militant non-lethally sniped another unnamed soldier from the same IDF unit. In both instances, the soldiers were distracted by protesters at the fence, so the IDF cynically concluded that the protesters were collaborating with the militants, but it is equally possible that the militants were independently taking advantage of the situation.

The Reckoning

On March 18th, 2019, the United Nations Human Rights Council published an exhaustive report on the GMR. The ISF had fired live on protesters, killing 183 and wounding 6,106. Additionally, high-velocity munitions had been used – without justifications for safety or performance – which irreversibly shattered victims’ bones, such that 122 wounded protesters (including 22 children) required life-altering amputations. The ISF’s live fire killed 3 uniformed paramedics and injured 39 – often when actively treating the wounded -- whilst its live fire killed 2 marked journalists and injured 39. International law protects both professions, which makes these targets flagrant violations. On the Israeli side, there were 4 fatalities over the course of the GMR’s nine months.

The Commission on the GMR made several recommendations in its report based on its findings. In recognition of people’s inherent right to peaceful protest, the Commission recommended that Israel, “refrain from using lethal force against civilians, including children, journalists, health workers and persons with disabilities, who pose no imminent threat to life.” (p. 226, ¶793a) The commission also recommended that the Gazan authority (Hamas) prevent the use of incendiary kites and balloons.

Most importantly, the Commission recommended that Israel lift the blockade of Gaza immediately and allow the injured to seek treatment in hospitals outside Gaza, properly equipped to treat them. As a corollary to that recommendation, the Commission recommended the “efficient coordination for entry of medical items and equipment into Gaza, and remove the prohibition of entry applied to items with legitimate protective and medical uses, including carbon fibre components for the treatment of limb injuries.” (pp. 226-227 ¶ 797a-d) In effect, the Commission vindicated one of the GMR’s main objectives.

There are parallels to the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone Report, published in September 2009, which analyzed the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead into Gaza (December 27th, 2008 – January 18th, 2009). Israel had declined both commissions’ invitations to participate in the inquiries, both commissions had arrived at conclusions unfavorable to Israel… and almost nothing was done to implement the commissions’ recommendations and hold accountable those who had deprived Gazans of their human rights and dignity.

Exercise in Futility

Despite the GMR’s degeneration into violence from its peaceful intentions, the unembellished reality is that no demonstration would have persuaded the Israeli government to accede to the Palestinian demands. This was a situation from which Gazans could never vote themselves out as in a scenario of secession. The GMR was a last-ditch attempt to petition the Israeli government for redress, and it ended in abject carnage.

None of this means that Hamas’ offensive on October 7th, 2023, was justified. It was not justified, and no person who values human life would condone that day’s atrocities. What it does mean is that when people are pushed to such desperation and have no recourse for escape, it is understandable that they start breaking through gates and finding escape by unconventional means.

Swords Unsheathed

No choices on October 8th

On October 8th, 2023, no other realistic choice confronted Israel but an invasion of Gaza. Everyone everywhere reasonably understood that, including the Palestinians. Israel would have to seek and capture or kill those who had organized, assisted and perpetrated October 7th’s offensive, and rescue the 251 hostages whom Hamas had abducted. The only variable on October 8th was how much collateral damage there would be.

Guided tours were arranged for foreign journalists to Israel’s communities hit by Hamas’ offensive. Settlements like Netiv HaAsara, Nir Oz, Sderot, Be’eri, and of course, where many soon-to-be victims had congregated in celebration of Rosh Hashana, the Nova Music Festival. Cameras could be trained on the caked pools of blood on floors, see where human beings had been burnt alive, and interview distraught neighbors of Kibbutz Kissufim who recounted how initially they discerned no danger since the militants approached dressed in IDF uniforms or close counterfeits, a deception which is a grave violation of international law. After these tours, Israel discontinued all independent journalistic access to Gaza.

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) immediately began its blitz of northern Gaza. Israel warned northern Gaza’s residents – all 1.1 million of them – to flee for their own safety, which in their case meant southwards since that was the only direction available to them due to Israel’s blockade. A more skeptical interpretation of Israel’s warning, however, is that it communicated Israel’s intention not to discriminate between civilians and militants but collectively to punish all Palestinians for Hamas’ offensive. Israeli president Isaac Herzog corroborated such interpretation at a press conference on October 13th, 2023, when he stated, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

On October 17th, 2023, al-Ahli Baptist Hospital suffered an explosion which killed around 250 people. Both sides blamed each other, but to the best available evidence, it appears that a remotely launched rocket from Hamas struck the hospital. During the campaign in Gaza, all 37 of Gaza’s hospitals, clinics and field hospitals would be hit by direct or accidental attacks, or be forced to close due to their propinquity.

The IDF’s incursion by infantry commenced on October 28th, 2023, supported by naval bombardments. On October 31st, 2023, the IDF bombarded the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, killing 50 Palestinians and injuring 100 in order to assassinate Hamas leader Ibrahim Biari. Israel’s onslaught against Gaza proceeded southwards, with the IDF reaching Khan Younis on December 5th, 2023. On December 24th, 2023, the IAF killed 70 people in bombardment of the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza.

Ratcheting up the tally on collateral damage, on February 29th, 2024, the IDF led Palestinians to a clearing nearby Gaza City for distribution of sorely needed humanitarian aid. When the Palestinians went to pick up packets of flour, the IDF sprayed them with submachine guns. In total, 112 Palestinians were killed and 750 injured in what journalists have dubbed the “Flour Massacre,” though it is uncertain how many casualties were from the gunfire or the ensuing panic.

The conflict in Gaza was also widening to encompass other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, Yemen’s Houthi militants seized the ship Galaxy Leader navigating the Red Sea on November 19th, 2023. Though it was flagged Bahamian, it was registered to Israeli billionaire Abraham “Rami” Ungar, who is one of Israel’s wealthiest citizens. Israel suspected that Iran had sponsored this attack, so on April 1st, 2024, the IAF bombed Iran’s embassy in Damascus, Syria. On April 13th, 2024, Iran retaliated with a barrage of more than 300 missiles into Israel, some of which bypassed the Iron Dome missile-defense system.

Later that year, Israel pioneered a tactic which had never been seen in warfare’s long history. On September 17th, 2024, 15:30 local time, around 4000 pagers (“beepers”) supposedly belonging to militants of Hezbollah in Lebanon, exploded simultaneously. The blasts killed 12 people outright but grievously injured 3,000 people, often children who lost eyes and fingers to the attack. The following day, it was walkie-talkies which exploded, killing 20 people and wounding 450. Though the rules of conventional warfare may not strictly apply to an organization like Hezbollah which falls under no state’s authority, Israel’s tactic – perpetrated by infiltration of the stream of international commerce – was extremely hazardous being that anyone could have repurchased these mass-produced household electronics. Israel gained tactical advantage but at the cost of the world’s wariness to consort in commerce with Israel for fear that merchandise produced in or passing through that country may be undetectably sabotaged or compromised.

Israel’s tactic of the remote detonation of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon did neutralize an unknown number of Hezbollah’s operatives amongst the uninvolved bystanders. On September 20th, 2024, an airstrike by the IAF in Beirut eliminated Ibrahim Aqil and several senior militants in Hezbollah. Another IAF airstrike eight days later in southern Beirut eliminated Hezbollah’s founder and chief Hassan Nasrallah. Further airstrikes by the IAF into October neutralized the rest of Hezbollah’s chiefs, such that by February 2025, Lebanon elected a new government over which Hezbollah could exert no influence.

Hezbollah’s hegemon of Iran was still in play, so on June 13th, 2025, the IAF bombarded military targets throughout Iran after sabotaging anti-aircraft defenses. This produced outrage in the United States since at the very time, U.S. diplomats were in Iran, negotiating with its government about its civilian nuclear program. To outward appearances – reinforced by U.S. President Donald Trump’s expressed surprise about Israel’s actions – it seemed that Israel had utilized the U.S. diplomacy to screen its attack on Iran, thereby debasing the USA’s goodwill just to secure short-term tactical advantage. As it worked out, Israel dragged its ally the USA (which in all honestly, let itself be dragged) into this conflict with Iran, such that on June 22nd, 2025, jointly they executed Operation Midnight Hammer to use airstrikes against Iran’s three nuclear sites of Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

In a similar instance of subterfuge and betrayal, Qatar had proposed to broker negotiations for a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Thus, Qatar hosted Hamas’ leadership for a conference in its capital Doha. On September 9th, 2025, an airstrike by the IAF killed the Hamas officials and a Qatari subject, deliberately scuppering the negotiations. As seen throughout this campaign, Israel seized short-term tactical advantage – this time, assassinating Hamas officials – at the cost of long-term regional stability.

Another worrisome example of short-term tactical advantage at the cost of long-term regional stability was Israel’s drone-bombings on September 9th and 10th, 2025, of two ships docked at Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia, nowhere near Israel’s territorial waters. These were flagships of the Samud Flotilla, a convoy of some 20 vessels which had departed from Barcelona with the mission of delivering verifiable humanitarian aid to civilians under siege in Gaza. Ultimately the Israeli navy intercepted all the vessels, and imprisoned the activists aboard, who witnessed and experienced gratuitous brutality by the jailers designed to humiliate the abductees rather than in conformance with any security protocols. In short, by attacking vessels obviously in Tunisian waters, Israel demonstrated that it would respect no country’s sovereignty in Israel’s ever elusive pursuit of security.

On the home front, in August 2025, shocking footage emerged out of Gaza in defiance of Israel’s enforced media blackout. Decorated Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Tony Aguilar, a graduate of West Point, after retirement had taken a job between May and June 2025 as a subcontractor with a firm called UG Solutions, which handled security for an entity named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The IDF had hired the GHF to distribute foodstuffs to the Palestinian refugees at four locations in southern Gaza. Far from being an occasion for Israel to show some mercy to Gaza’s beleaguered civilian population – and maybe dispel lingering accusations that Israel was intentionally perpetrating genocide in Gaza as South Africa had formally charged at the International Court of Justice in the Hague on December 29th, 2023 – these distributions of aid were weaponized against the refugees.

They were arranged such that the strongest and quickest amongst the queued refugees could collect the most amount of aid, by which the observing IDF would presume that these were Hamas militants, and kill them on the spot. As Lt. Col. Aguilar recounted – bolstered by the only photographs and video to be smuggled out of Gaza of these events – the distributions of humanitarian aid were turned into a macabre version of “the Hunger Games,” and the resultant shootings at the end, as had happened during the Flour Massacre in February 2024, were the whole objective and not simply incidental.

By the second anniversary of Hamas’ offensive, October 7th, 2025, the campaign in Gaza had caused 900 IDF fatalities, and killed conservatively 68,000 Gazans, though some estimates are markedly higher. Of the 251 hostages whom Hamas initially seized, 187 were released voluntarily, 16 were rescued, and 3 were killed by mistake during rescue by the IDF. The number of casualties amongst Hamas militants is a figure impossible now to give with certainty being that both sides employ different methodologies to count them, then politicize the statistics (Hamas tending to under-report its casualties and the IDF targeting all Palestinians as militants). Almost 170,000 Gazans had been wounded with 1.9 million displaced indefinitely. Infrastructurally, the campaign has annihilated 197,000 buildings across Gaza, leaving nothing but a hellscape, and undoubtedly more casualties will be discovered underneath the rubble whenever it is bulldozed.

In summary, from the outset we knew that a campaign in Gaza would produce collateral damage. In the last two years, we discovered that the world was unprepared for the full extent of it. As things now stand, both sides accuse the other of mala fides in negotiations of and compliance with a ceasefire, so this conflict could continue a while longer. For this very reason, there is no time like the present to start thinking about the next outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Palestine, because nothing is surer than the fact that no peace will endure unless it is supported by vested mutual interest. The surest way to establishing vested mutual interest is the creation at the earliest of a free and independent State of Palestine, to exist in peace and commerce with its neighbor Israel.

Room for All

In 1978, Israel’s future and current premier Benjamin Netanyahu appeared at an academic town hall in the USA and – in discussion about various topics – dismissed the notion of a free and independent Palestine as superfluous since MENA already had 21 Arab countries, so one more would be too many. It was and is a rather flimsy argument considering that all of Israel’s traditional enemies in MENA had always said that there was just one too many Jewish countries in the region! The fact of the matter is that there is room enough for one more, and that even before LaRouche’s Oasis Plan renders hospitable wider stretches of land in Israel and Palestine.

Given the tumultuous history between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, which the present series has chronicled in fair detail, it is understandable that the establishment of a free and independent State of Palestine may initially seem counterintuitive to Israeli sensibilities. That said, Jews have been in conflict with these Arabs for a hundred years, if not longer. Since problems cannot be solved with the same mentality which got you into them, a new way of thinking is needed if the cycle of conflict between these two peoples is to be broken.

The key ingredient to any relationship – between individuals, groups and scaled up to nations – is mutual respect. Mutual respect means that one person regards the other as equal in terms of free will in life and their relationship. It is the rudiment underpinning civilization itself. Over the course of their lives and relationship, both individuals will value and desire different things at different times. Mutual respect in such cases means that if they cannot agree on a compromise or the like, then no person has any more right to coerce the other to his will.

Switching from generalizations to specifics, Israel must regard Palestine as entitled to pursue its own destiny, and Palestine must allow Israel to do the same. The next and final article will cover how this is to be achieved.