Gaza Strip

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

The Gaza Strip is part of Palestine, a term that refers to the entity which has governed the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1994. As of 2005 Palestine had not yet become an independent sovereign state, but it was widely seen as a state-in-the-making for the Palestinian people.

The Gaza Strip is an area of 360 square kilometers (139 square miles) along the Mediterranean coast between Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Israel. Mostly composed of sandy plains and low, rolling hills, with 1.3 million inhabitants, the region is one of the most densely populated in the world. The population is overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab and Muslim (98.7%). However, a Christian Palestinian minority of about 1 percent does exist. Approximately 75 percent of the residents of Gaza are refugees from Palestine. Until 2005 there was also a post-1967 Jewish population of settlers which numbered about 7,000.

The Gaza Strip economy is primarily based on agriculture. Remittances from migrant laborers—the vast majority of whom work in adjacent Israel—and from the Palestinian diaspora provide vital sources of income. Since the 1990s employment within the emergent Palestinian bureaucracy, with its southern administrative center in Gaza City, has also sustained many Palestinian families.

The Gaza Strip was formerly part of the Palestine Mandate, administered by Great Britain from 1923 to 1948. During the war that followed Israel's declaration of independence in 1948, the Gaza Strip fell under Egyptian rule and was administered by an Egyptian military governor. Although Egypt maintained political control, the Gaza Strip was never annexed. Instead, it was held "in trust" for the Palestinian people, and its laws, court system, and bureaucracy were kept relatively unchanged.

Israel conquered the Gaza Strip during the Arab-Israeli War in June 1967. It did not annex the Gaza Strip, but through a military government controlled almost every aspect of Palestinian life. Israel has also sponsored the settlement of Palestinian lands by Israeli settlers, an action the United Nations (UN) has rejected as illegal.

The Gaza Strip fell under a so-called Palestinian Authority (PA) that was created in the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements concluded between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993. In 1996 PLO leader Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) was elected president of the PA; eighty-eight members of the Palestine Legislative Council were also elected. The Gaza Strip has been a stronghold of

Islamist opponents of peace negotiations with Israel, who have boycotted the PA elections and advocated violence to end Israeli military occupation.

According to the terms of the Oslo Accords, the PA is not a sovereign state; it lacks full functional and territorial control over the region. Arafat's authoritarian tendencies and charges of both corruption and incompetence within the PA led to reforms in 2002 and 2003. In 2004 Israel mounted a series of raids into the Gaza Strip, ostensibly to stem weapons-smuggling from across the border in Egypt, but also crippling much of the PA infrastructure and demolishing scores of Palestinian homes in the process. After Arafat's death in November 2004, West Bank and Gazan Palestinians elected Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas, a principal architect of the Oslo Accords, declared an end to the armed intifada (uprising) against Israel and promoted negotiations toward a final peace. In 2005, the Israeli government forced all Israeli settlers to leave Gaza, withdrawing its troops and leaving the Gaza Strip to the PA.

Gaza Strip; Israel; Palestine.

Brown, Nathan. Palestinian Politics After the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Robinson, Glenn. Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997.

This is the complete article, containing 658 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).