Since the gruesome Hamas attacks on October 7 Israel has waged war on the Palestinian group Hamas. Israel says its attack will not stop until Hamas is defeated, despite calls for a ceasefire.
As violence threatens to spill out across the region, we show you who is involved, why and where things could go from here.
Credit: 360info
As violence threatens to spill out across the region, we show you who is involved, why and where things could go from here.
Credit: 360info
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NewsTranscript
00:00 The war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel is the extension of a long and complicated situation.
00:08 Without addressing the context, we lose sight of the bigger picture, which is Palestinians
00:13 have been living under military occupation, which has ruled every facet of their life
00:18 since 1967.
00:20 Is peace an actual possibility, or is the suffering set to continue as opportunists
00:25 take advantage of the crisis?
00:28 To untangle the complexities, we will show you who is involved and why, as the cycle
00:33 of violence threatens to spill out across the region.
00:37 This is a series of maps of the state of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinian lands
00:42 following the United Nations mandate of 1947, which gave the Jewish people a homeland after
00:48 the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe.
00:50 So this is a hundred year struggle that has shaped much of the discourse across both Arab
00:58 and Muslim societies.
01:00 This is the map of 1948, following the first Israeli-Arab war after Israel had declared
01:04 itself a sovereign state.
01:06 In Arabic, this is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
01:11 Israel's right to exist has been challenged by its neighbours ever since.
01:14 Despite two reported air raid attempts, Jerusalem is relatively calm.
01:19 At the end of the Six Day War of June 1967, Israel took considerable territory from its
01:24 neighbours, the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from
01:28 Jordan and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.
01:32 That's when Israel occupied East Jerusalem and that's when I would argue that the two
01:37 state solution ceased to being a viable prospect because if there's no Jerusalem, there's no
01:42 Palestine.
01:43 Palestinians simply will not accept not having East Jerusalem as their capital.
01:48 These gains have held firm since, outside of the return of Sinai to Egypt in 1982.
01:54 These new borders place Palestinian territories under Israeli control.
01:57 Since 1967, the extension of Israeli settlements in occupied lands has increased.
02:03 More than 450,000 Israeli settlers have moved to the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem,
02:08 setting up fortified communities in breach of international law.
02:12 In many respects, the settler movement is about a more Jewish nationalism and these
02:18 Jewish settlers increasingly, they're more radical, they're more militant.
02:25 The result has been more violence between settlers and Palestinians.
02:28 The Palestinian territories consist of two areas, Gaza, a strip of land on the Mediterranean
02:34 coast, 41 kilometres long and 13 kilometres wide at its largest points, and the West Bank,
02:40 making in East Jerusalem and one of Islam's holiest sites, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
02:46 It is split into zones controlled by Israeli forces and those controlled by the Palestinian
02:50 authorities.
02:52 Also splitting the territory is a nine metre high, three metre thick concrete barrier.
02:57 I was raised up in the West Bank.
02:59 I spent the vast majority of my life actually in the West Bank.
03:02 And I can tell you that there isn't a single empty piece of land that has not been expropriated
03:07 by the Israeli military or completely prohibits Palestinians from accessing.
03:13 The West Bank is controlled by Fatah, the group once led by Yasser Arafat.
03:18 Hamas has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007.
03:22 Fatah is an Arab nationalist movement, broadly speaking, and Hamas is an Islamist movement.
03:27 So it's really a reflection of the two big ideological currents in the Arab world.
03:33 Do we unite under language, which is the Arab nationalist, or do we unite as a people under
03:40 religion?
03:41 Hamas developed out of what is known as the First Intifada, a civil uprising against Israeli
03:46 occupation in the 1980s.
03:49 Launched as the armed wing of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has two goals, to
03:53 resist Israeli occupation and to resist Fatah's control of the Palestinian resistance narrative.
03:59 Hamas was there living the day to day life.
04:02 Against Fatah driving around in their Mercedes, living the high life, traveling around European
04:08 capitals.
04:09 That was a big criticism of Fatah.
04:12 The First Intifada ended with the Oslo Accords in 1993, further raising hopes of a two-state
04:17 solution and giving Palestinians limited autonomy in exchange for recognizing Israel.
04:23 The Oslo Accords was sold to everyone as a peace accords, but it was never about peace
04:28 between Palestinians and Israelis.
04:31 Hamas had always criticized the Oslo Accords as being the great betrayal of the Palestinian
04:36 national cause.
04:38 And if I'm honest, I actually think that they're right.
04:42 The two-state solution has been dead since the mid 1990s.
04:45 And it baffles me when I hear Australian officials, Minister Wong and others, talk about the two-state
04:52 solution in all seriousness.
04:54 It absolutely baffles me.
04:56 Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and when Hamas won local elections in 2007, the Palestinian
05:02 cause split.
05:04 The Palestinian Authority has been playing the political game because they do very well
05:09 understand that without playing this political game that the international community wants
05:13 to hear, which is the two-state solution and finding a just and peaceful settlement with
05:17 Israel based on the two-state solution model.
05:20 Without this tokenistic rhetoric, the Palestinian Authority would be cut off from international
05:25 aid.
05:26 In Gaza, Hamas increasingly turned to violent resistance as a way of maintaining legitimacy.
05:32 Wars erupted in the tiny enclave in 2008 and 2014.
05:37 Hamas has been excluded from the political process.
05:40 It has no legal recourse against the occupation, so it's left to violence.
05:45 Isolation meant that Hamas struggled to fund the services for its people.
05:49 Extreme poverty is just one of the many grim factors of daily life as foreign aid is controlled
05:54 by Israel and Egypt.
05:57 Hamas' funding comes from primarily outside sources, most notably Qatar and Iran, some
06:03 believe with strings attached.
06:06 Since the gruesome Hamas attacks on October 7, Israel's response has not been entirely
06:10 focused on Hamas.
06:12 A series of Israeli strikes have targeted Syrian infrastructure, while the militant
06:16 group Hezbollah has come under attack in Lebanon.
06:19 But I think a lot of it is sending a message to Iran, sending a message to Syria.
06:25 This is not just about Gaza.
06:26 Don't think about stepping in.
06:28 Hezbollah is a political movement and militia which holds significant influence in Lebanon
06:33 and is heavily backed by Iran.
06:35 Born out of that nation's civil war of the 70s and 80s, it has an estimated 20,000 fighters
06:41 in its ranks.
06:42 For Iran, Hamas has less of a strategic imperative than Hezbollah.
06:48 Hezbollah is really the Iranian proxy here.
06:53 It's also unclear whether there was direct coordination between Hamas and the Gaza Strip
06:59 and Hezbollah at the start of this war.
07:01 The sheer amount of these groups being funded in different conflicts across the region concerns
07:06 many of a wider war.
07:08 Zoom out further and you see the military power of Iran and the financial power of Saudi
07:13 Arabia as key.
07:15 Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran and Israel have been on a collision course.
07:21 Iran still denies Israel's right to exist and refers to it as a Zionist entity.
07:27 Where Israel works to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program, Iran funds a series of groups
07:35 to fight against Israel in conflicts closer to home.
07:39 However, a direct confrontation could cripple an already ailing Iranian economy.
07:45 From Iranian perspective, again, I highly doubt that they will be fully engaged in this
07:49 war through Hezbollah or even directly with the Israeli government.
07:53 There's just too much to lose at the moment.
07:58 During the presidency of Donald Trump, the US helped broker the Abraham Accords, bringing
08:02 some Gulf nations closer to Israel.
08:05 Saudi Arabia too is normalizing its relations.
08:08 It shows an obvious split between Arab leaders and the Palestinian struggle and also reflects
08:14 the increasing isolation of Iran.
08:17 As Iran appears to fuel the Palestinian resistance, Saudi Arabia grows closer to Israel.
08:23 So the Saudis remain to be more interested in economics and business rather than politics,
08:29 and they are very hesitant to engage.
08:32 It can also be viewed through the lens of Iran's proxy war with Saudi Arabia.
08:36 The two have been in opposition across the region, not just in markings on a map, but
08:41 seen in the hollowed out buildings of Syria and the famine in Yemen.
08:46 The region is reshaping itself once again, but the pain is felt most by those with no
08:51 power to stop it.
08:55 "No, no, no, no."
08:56 "No, no, no, no."
08:57 [BLANK_AUDIO]