Did the Israeli occupation of Gaza end ?
While it is true that Israeli forces and settlers withdrew from within Gaza in 2005, this does not mean that the occupation was ended. How is this possible?
There is a general misconception regarding what constitutes a military occupation. Many believe that it takes boots on the ground to consider an area occupied, but today this is no longer the case. For an area to be considered occupied the occupying state must exercise “effective control” over the occupied area. This idea becomes even more clear when we consider Israeli surveillance and monitoring technology that allow for greater control of an area through controlling select key positions without the necessity of a full occupation force in the territory.
It is without a doubt that Israel holds effective control over the Gaza strip, Israeli law experts would naturally beg to differ, but these same experts argued that Gaza was unoccupied even before Israel withdrew its forces and settlers anyway. Israel controls virtually every aspect of life in Gaza. Israel maintains control of Gaza’s airspace, its territorial waters, no-go zones within the strip and even the population registry, meaning Israel even gets to determine who is a Palestinian and who isn’t inside the Gaza strip. What kind of sovereign, non-occupied entity can’t even determine who its citizens are?
This is not conjecture, but the opinion of the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross and countless other international organizations specialized in human rights and international humanitarian law.
However, we must situate the Israeli claims that Gaza is not occupied within its correct historical context. As mentioned above, even prior to 2005, Israel always argued that the Gaza strip was unoccupied, even with its troops and settlements and military bases. As a matter of fact, Israel even claims the same about the West Bank to this day. The argument being that for an occupation to exist, a territory must be part of a sovereign state, which the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not, even though they were controlled by other sovereign states. This same justification is used to argue that the Geneva conventions, and international and humanitarian law in general, don’t apply to Palestinians. Of course, this argument was never accepted by the world community which still maintains that these areas are occupied.
The lesson here is that Israeli legal claims have never been in good faith. If Israel could legally claim that an area with thousands of soldiers and dozens of bases and settlements is not occupied, then of course it would argue the same for Gaza today.