لخّصلي

Gaza City has a long history, the Gaza Strip is a recent creation.2The city of Gaza was probably founded around 1500 BC; place of passage, it has been successively Egyptian, Philistine (hence the name of Palestine given to the region by the Roman Emperor Hadrian), Israelite, Achaemenid Persian, Chaldean, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Frankish, Mamluk, Ottoman (1517 to 1917), then British before the emergence of the Gaza Strip.

Gaza City has a long history, the Gaza Strip is a recent creation.

2The city of Gaza was probably founded around 1500 BC; place of passage, it has been successively Egyptian, Philistine (hence the name of Palestine given to the region by the Roman Emperor Hadrian), Israelite, Achaemenid Persian, Chaldean, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Frankish, Mamluk, Ottoman (1517 to 1917), then British before the emergence of the Gaza Strip.

3The “Gaza Strip” arose out of the Rhodes armistice negotiations after the first Israeli-Arab war in 1949. The territory which covers 362 km2 has 11 km of border with Egypt (Rafah border post), 51 km of border with Israel and 40 km of coastline along the Mediterranean.

4The Gaza Strip will be administered by Egypt from 1948 to 1967. In 1950, the population was 254,000. No Jew is allowed to live there. Egypt maintains Gaza under military command and manages the territory as a protectorate whose inhabitants become stateless. Encouraged by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, the first Fedayeen commandos began operating in 1954 against southern Israel, killing civilians. Israel retaliates militarily. The cycle of violence has started. It was in Gaza that a (proto-) PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was built under Egyptian authority in the late 1950s-early 1960s.

5In 1956, Israel intervened in support of the Anglo-French operation against Egypt and took control of the Gaza Strip for four months. The traditionally agricultural Gaza economy has not seen the slightest industrial development under Egyptian administration.

6In June 1967, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip. The territory will be connected to electricity and running water networks. For 25 years nearly 100,000 Palestinians went to work in Israel despite the wave of terrorist attacks followed by reprisals perpetrated by nationalist movements in 1970 and 1971. The Gaza economy became integrated into the Israeli market on which it became dependent. Gaza exports mainly agricultural products to Israel but also finished products manufactured under Israeli license in the border industrial zone of Erez (destroyed in 2006). The main source of income, however, remained unskilled labor used in Israeli construction and agriculture until the second intifada in 2000, when the entire Gaza economy collapsed.

71979: Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. This will be the withdrawal (effective in 1982) from Sinai; the agreements circumscribe the Egyptian (zones A, B, C) and Israeli (zone D) forces. Egypt no longer wants to administer the Gaza Strip.

8During the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood forged an important social network of aid in the Strip and secured an institutional base: the waqf (management of religious property) and the Islamic University of Gaza.