A Brief History of Perpetual War and Dehumanization 2007-2023
Dotan Halevy
The destruction of Gaza and its people since October 7, 2023, could not have been undertaken without an acceleration in the dehumanization of the Palestinians since Hamas’s assumption of power in the Strip in 2007. More than an abstract cultural process, Gaza’s dehumanization in Israel was a product of deliberate state decisions. To understand the unfolding of the war on Gaza, then, we should ask what Israel’s policies towards the Gaza Strip were over a decade and a half before October 2023?
This essay focuses on three such Israeli policies and reveals their crucial role in determining Israel’s conduct of war as it evolved into an orchestrated campaign of extermination. First, the blockade —Israel’s strict control over the entry and exit of goods. Second, Gaza’s isolation and Israel’s prevention of human mobility. And third, Gaza’s securitization, Israel’s application of maximum military control over the Strip while assuming minimum civilian responsibility. To be sure, none of these policies was invented in 2007. All evolved over the course of Israel’s gradual withdrawal from Gaza beginning in the 1990s and into the second Intifada. And yet, Hamas’s 2007 takeover of the Strip allowed Israel to perfect them in terms of military means and government strategy. Blockade, isolation, and securitization supplied Israel with the means of “conflict management” following the collapse of the Oslo paradigm. These policies successfully “contained” Hamas in the Gaza Strip while seemingly supplying the organization with a limited autonomy; the conflict with the Palestinians in the West Bank remained “limited” in scope, and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank en route to future annexation continued virtually unchallenged by the international community. As we now know well, it was the impasse these policies created that led Hamas to unleash the October 7 raid and massacre on Israeli military bases and civilian settlements. These very policies also laid the groundwork for the atrocious means by which Israel reacted in the two years that followed. For those following Israel’s construction of Gaza as nothing more than a securitized military object, the war crimes, destruction, and mass killing we have witnessed were, in many ways, foretold.
Blockade
In response to Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel, under then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, declared the Gaza Strip an “Enemy Entity” and imposed a complete blockade on the territory. Israel’s decision overturned a core condition of the Oslo agreements, which stated that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are one unified Palestinian territory. Israel’s blockade of the Strip in 2007 began with a total shutdown of three out of five crossings between Israel and Gaza, leaving only two operational—the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south and the Erez crossing in the north. While Erez remained a crossing for people traveling to and from Israel, Kerem Shalom served as a point for the movement of goods linking Egypt, Israel, and Gaza. Officially, Israel permitted only “humanitarian” supplies into the Strip, blocking any goods beyond basic needs, with the declared aim of making living conditions severe and inciting a popular uprising against Hamas. In this context, the weaponization of commercial goods and humanitarian aid, a key part of Israel’s war on Gaza after October 7, 2023, had been part of Israeli policy since at least 2007.
From then on, the blockade fluctuated in intensity based on Israel’s assessment of the threat from Gaza. For example, after 2007, only a limited list of products was permitted into the Strip. However, in 2010, following the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident, this policy shifted. Prime Minister Netanyahu introduced a new approach under which most products were generally allowed, except for a growing undisclosed list of items, mainly so-called dual-use items that could arguably serve both civil and military purposes. Over the years, classifying imports as dual-use has been key to limiting Gaza’s ability for economic growth and reconstruction. The supply of building materials, castor oil, fertilizers, X-ray machines, cranes, fiber optics, and thousands of other essential items was often inconsistent or entirely banned.
Besides easing the siege somewhat, since 2009, Israel under Netanyahu also ignored the thriving tunnel economy beneath the Strip’s border with Egypt (the Philadelphi Corridor), where Gazans smuggled everything from toothpaste to television sets, and from living lions to Toyota pickups, making tunnels the most profitable enterprise in the Strip. The city of Rafah, located on both sides of the border, evolved into an economic hub centered around tunnel trade. The tunnels also served as a crucial source of income for Hamas to maintain control of the Strip, generating tax revenues. Ignoring the tunnel economy was Israel’s way of tacitly recognizing Hamas’ authority and enabling an economic safety valve for the Strip while formally maintaining a siege against an enemy.
Beginning in 2011, the ebb and flow of the blockade likewise became intertwined with political developments and periodic military confrontations. With Israel turning a blind eye, and the presidency of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt between 2012 and 2013, these years were the golden age of the tunnel economy. However, when Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi seized power in Egypt in a military coup in 2013, he destroyed most of the tunnels as part of his retribution against the Muslim Brotherhood, causing a severe economic downturn in Gaza. One outcome of this hardship was Hamas’s efforts to reconcile with Fatah and to arrange new elections in the Palestinian Authority (PA) to establish a unity government. The stakes of such a move for Israel’s ability to continue controlling Gaza and the West Bank separately were high. Tension escalated in the West Bank, leading to the kidnapping and murder of three young boys south of Hebron by a Hamas-related squad. Israel’s harsh reaction in the West Bank evolved into an open conflict with Hamas in Gaza, leading to the military offensive “Protective Edge” in 2014.
After 2014, Israel once again eased the blockade. The scale of destruction in Gaza following the offensive was so massive that Israel decided to cooperate with the PA and the UN to create a reconstruction mechanism to allow large amounts of construction supplies in. The central condition for the program was that it bypassed Hamas. The result was the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM), which, until the current war, governed significant segments of rebuilding in Gaza. Initiated to facilitate and expedite Gaza’s rapid and efficient rehabilitation, the GRM created logistical bottlenecks that, in practice, delayed reconstruction. Residential areas remained in ruins for years, forcing Gazans to live in destroyed apartments or relocate internally.
With no hope of improvement in sight, in 2018, the people of Gaza took their rage to the Strip’s borders, carrying out large marches in the Strip’s agricultural peripheries overlooking the fence with Israel. The “Great Marches of Return” aimed to challenge both Hamas and Israel non-violently while promoting Palestinian unity. Hamas used the events to mobilize young men to storm the fences. The Israeli army responded by killing hundreds of Palestinians with snipers, leading to two years of clashes along the Gaza fence. Meanwhile, Hamas’s authority faced internal challenges and again sought reconciliation with Fatah. This led both parties to agree on conducting elections in 2021. However, as the elections approached, Israel denied Jerusalemite Palestinians, who made up around 6-7% of the Palestinian population, the right to vote. These heightened tensions eventually erupted into open clashes in May, leading to the 2021 war in Gaza. Israel again tightened its hold, only to later relax it somewhat by raising the quota of permits to work in Israel to roughly 20,000 for the first time since 2007, a move that provided much-needed economic relief amid close to 50% unemployment. Overall, whether in strict or lenient periods, Israel has maintained control over everything going in and out of Gaza, constructing the Strip as a space that can collapse into a catastrophe at its discretion.
Palestinian protesters during the Great March of Return. Photograph by Mahmoud Bassam, April 6, 2018 (UNRWA Photo Collection).
Isolation
In addition to controlling the supply and movement of goods, since 2007, Israel has significantly restricted the movement of people from Gaza into Israel or the West Bank. Israel’s declared “Separation Policy,” which isolated the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, classified Palestinians exclusively as residents of only one of these areas, prohibiting changing residency from the first to the latter. Temporary travel to Israel or the West Bank for academic studies, medical treatment, or family visits was generally not allowed, except in rare cases involving complex bureaucracy and considerable time and expense.
The IDF occasionally created categories for exceptional circumstances but never publicly announced them. These were circulated internally as “Permits Status” documents and were usually limited to attending first-degree relatives’ family events or emergency medical treatment. All permits for leaving Gaza were short-term, granted on an as-needed basis, and issued ex gratia to avoid setting legal precedents. Intelligence agencies conducted the initial review of any leave request in secret, without accountability or transparency. Occasionally, the court overturned such decisions when human rights groups challenged them. However, most Palestinians seeking to leave Gaza could not afford to pursue legal action, and the resources of human rights organizations taking such cases voluntarily could not meet the demand.
Maintaining Gaza’s residents imprisoned inside the Strip aimed to prevent Palestinian population growth in the West Bank due to the change of residency, thus facilitating settlement expansion and potential annexation in the future. Furthermore, Israeli movement restrictions also applied to travel through Gaza’s only gateway to Egypt, the Rafah crossing. Since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, Israel has approved or denied all entries and exits at Rafah as part of its security coordination with Egypt. This was possible because, under the Oslo agreements, the Palestinian population registry, including records of birth, death, residency, and personal status, is maintained jointly by the PA and the Israeli Ministry of Interior.
Medical evacuation for injured Palestinians through Rafah crossing, Gaza Strip. photograph by Ashraf Amra, March 7, 2025 (UNRWA Photo Collection)
Similar to the weaponization of humanitarian and commercial goods, the Israeli policy of forcing Palestinians to live in ever-shrinking spaces demonstrated during the war is rooted in decades of separation policies. In March 2024, during the height of the war, journalist Amira Hass proposed that Israel should allow Gazan civilians to save their lives by traveling safely to the West Bank. Needless to say, Gaza’s isolation had become so naturalized that Israel did not even consider such a move, even for injured, sick children or older people. Even at the cost of killing tens of thousands of innocent people, Israel chose to maintain the separation policy as a central strategy to enable the future annexation of the West Bank with as few Palestinians as possible. In an article analyzing the logic of the 2005 disengagement, American Middle East scholar Darryl Li argued that the logic behind Israel’s isolation of the Gaza Strip was to keep as many Palestinians as possible confined to the smallest space. Israel’s actions in the war were a monstrous expression of this rule.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Israel’s strict control over Palestinian movement has also prevented Palestinians from emigrating since 2007. The impenetrable bureaucratic barriers, the worsening economic conditions, and the blocking of ties with the outside world effectively made emigration impossible for most Palestinians. Saving money, securing visas, and establishing connections with benefactors became increasingly difficult. Migration requires some degree of freedom. Israel’s security apparatus relied on denying this very freedom and closely monitoring every step of every person in Gaza. Over the years, Gazans could leave and enter the Strip clandestinely (and at considerable financial costs) through the tunnels of Rafah. However, the exact numbers and efficiency of this phenomenon are unclear. In any case, this was not a preferred mode of migration, as it left migrants crossing into Egypt as illegal residents.
This dynamic remained consistent throughout the war as well. Israel explicitly stated that its primary goal was to ethnically cleanse the Strip. However, the extensive and repeated forced displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s assault mostly pushed Gazans into smaller and smaller parts of the Strip, with only the most privileged able to leave by paying large sums of money and the support of benefactors outside the Strip. Since May 2024, when Israel took control of the southern Gaza Strip, including the Rafah crossing, outmigration has been blocked almost completely.
Securitization
As the blockade and isolation policies persisted, Hamas shifted from being a rival of Israel’s right-wing governments to its most important political ally. The ongoing blockade, missile attacks, and military operations served both sides’ shared goals of preventing negotiations for a peaceful resolution between Israelis and Palestinians. Consequently, Israel chose not to pursue overthrowing Hamas, but to “contain it” through periodic wars—destructive and deadly, yet limited in scope. For Hamas’s part, since 2007, its primary goal has been to pressure Israel to lift the siege rather than to liberate Palestine. The blockade could even be seen as beneficial for Hamas. The organization could take pride in controlling the largest contiguous part of historic Palestine without Israeli presence, while challenging Israel militarily by launching missiles that reached much of the country, and deterring Israeli invasions. Following each round of hostilities—in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, and 2022—Hamas signed a temporary ceasefire with Israel, solidifying its status as a semi-sovereign that Israel was forced to acknowledge.
For Israel, this was a favorable arrangement. It controlled Gaza from all sides, including from the air, underground, and sea, along with the Palestinians’ identity registration, telephone and internet lines, currency, movement, etc. In addition, as long as Hamas was considered a semi-sovereign, Israel could argue that it was not an occupying power in the Strip. The approach Israel had developed toward Gaza had developed into a neat formula of maximum control with minimum responsibility. Control involved military containment of the threat posed by Gaza: the Strip was sealed off by a physical barrier, which included a no-go zone, smart fences and walls—including at sea—an underground barrier to prevent tunnels, constant drone surveillance and watchtowers equipped with remotely operated machine guns, and radars to detect and intercept missiles. At the same time, Israel denied any responsibility for the effect of these security measures on the Strip’s civilian population. The government repeatedly managed to convince even the Israeli Supreme Court that Israel is not obliged to provide Gazans with rights, privileges, passage into or from Israel, services, or products, as this is an enemy population, rather than a civilian population under occupation. This policy guided Israel’s unrestricted use of violence against Gazans, subjecting the Strip to a regime of routine extrajudicial killings by fighter jets or drones, and categorizing civilian death as “collateral damage.”
Adi Ophir and Ariella Azoulay claimed that after 2007, Israel “abandoned” Gaza, leaving it without any governing legal framework, so that killing its residents could be done with impunity. They have since been proven right. Thousands have been killed in Gaza in each war since 2008, and approximately 1.1 million people, half of the Strip’s population, came of age knowing only this reality.
Concretizing Gaza’s legal void further, Israel has moved to increasingly rely on technological systems for security, removing human soldiers. Before October 7, Israel used AI tools based on probability and machine learning to generate military targets, making every person and place in the Strip a potential target. These tools do not account for their data processing paths, bringing the concept of killing with impunity to a dystopian dimension. By design, there is no one to blame for the killing decided upon by a machine. The AI target generators were developed for a conflict management system in which ongoing “rounds” of limited hostilities required an endless list of targets for years to come. Applying this system for an all-out war of vengeance and destruction after October 7, 2023, transformed it into an extermination mechanism, resulting in a disproportionate number of civilian casualties, including tens of thousands of children.
On the Israeli side, 16 years of securitization developed advanced interception and alert technologies that were used to contain the missile and rocket threat from the Gaza Strip. In the age of isolation, Israelis came to recognize the Strip only with the rocket threat. Hardly any Israeli under 30 has actually seen or talked with a Palestinian from Gaza in real life. At the same time, the protection Israelis enjoyed under the Iron Dome and the state’s advanced alert system brought them to see recurring rocket attacks as a matter of resilience and civil steadfastness rather than a political crisis demanding a political solution. Within this context, for the generation of Israelis who came of age during these years, the Gaza Strip, with its 2.3 million inhabitants, was nothing but a nuisance. Israeli sociologist Yagil Levi has labeled the standard approach developed in Israel before October 7 as “dehumanization by ignorance.” He argued that no one actively indoctrinated Israelis to see Gazans as untermenschen to be destroyed, but that for most of the Israeli public, Gaza and Gazans existed as a foreign and distant reality, surfacing to consciousness only rarely, if at all.
In this case, too, the standard cemented before the revenge for the October 7 attack guided Israel’s conduct in the war. The formula of “maximum control, minimum responsibility” led Israel to ignore the consequences of its ground invasion of the Strip. According to the laws of occupation, an occupying force must replace the former authority and provide civilians with temporary administration and services until hostilities end. Indeed, one of the declared aims of this war was to destroy Hamas’s military and administrative capacities. However, upon its invasion, Israel avoided establishing an administrative mechanism for the population under its de facto authority, either ordering them to evacuate under fire to areas not yet occupied or leaving them to perish in isolated enclaves and battle zones under bombardment and without food or supplies. As Israel occupied more territory in Gaza, the army expanded this method. Rather than assuming responsibility over the residents, it systematically destroyed residential buildings and infrastructure so civilians could not stay or return, pushing them into smaller enclaves where the “no-responsibility” doctrine could remain intact. Thus, civilians crossing into military-controlled areas were entering killing zones, even when these areas were formally meant for civilian services. Such were, for instance, the aid distribution centers run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which in practice became arenas of massacre, with boundaries only known to the army. In an interview with Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson, a soldier stationed there said that although the centers were meant for civilians, the soldiers were not equipped with tear gas or other non-lethal crowd control tools. They were supposed to deal with civilians seeking aid using live ammunition. This rudimentary detail, which went almost unnoticed, tells the whole story. Non-lethal means in the hands of the army could imply some measure of Israeli responsibility for Palestinian lives. But in Gaza, where the value of human life had been shattered to dust over 16 years of dehumanization, this became unthinkable.
Displaced Palestinians during their journey back to Gaza and the north via Al-Rasheed Street. Photograph by Ashraf Amra, January 28, 2025 (UNRWA Photo Collection)
Conclusion
The policies that shaped Gaza between 2007 and 2023—blockade, isolation, and securitization—were not discrete or reactive measures but mutually reinforcing mechanisms that transformed the Strip into an arena of perpetual war and dehumanization. Over time, they created a political order in which Gaza was imagined and governed not as a society of two million people but as a problem to be contained, an object of security management rather than a community with political, civic, and human claims. This deliberate narrowing of Gaza’s status allowed Israel to exert total control while disclaiming responsibility, producing a political landscape in which deprivation, immobility, and recurrent mass killing became normalized.
These same policies also produced the conditions that made the events of October 7 possible. By sealing Gaza and sustaining a state of suspended catastrophe, Israel deepened Hamas’s stake in confrontation while foreclosing pathways for political resolution. When Hamas shattered the long-standing rules of conflict management, Israel responded through the only framework it had prepared for Gaza: maximized force deployed with minimal obligation. The result, after sixteen years of dehumanization and infrastructural degradation, was a war conducted with catastrophic disregard for civilian life.
If anything, the trajectory from 2007 to 2023 reveals not a sudden breakdown but the culmination of a long process. Blockade, isolation, and securitization were presented as temporary tools of discipline and protection, yet they hardened into a system that produced precisely the devastation it claimed to prevent. Understanding this history forces a reckoning: the violence of the present is not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a policy architecture that treated an entire population as disposable. Any future grounded in justice—rather than another cycle of containment—must begin by dismantling the structures that made this outcome both imaginable and, ultimately, inevitable.
Dotan Halevy is a historian of the modern Middle East and a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is the co-editor (together with Hanna Ben-Yehuda) of Israel’s Heterotopia: Gaza in Israeli Politics and Culture (Gama Publishers, July 2023 [Hebrew]). His first monograph, Stripped: A Modern History of the Gaza Borderland, is currently under contract with Stanford University Press.