Here are the top 10 things you must know about Israel-Palestine conflict

The Palestinian militant group Hamas launched one of the most brazen attacks on the state of Israel earlier on Saturday, infiltrating the country via air, land and sea on paragliders, speed boats and pickup trucks and launching ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood.’

The conflict, which has been embedded in the Middle East for several decades, intensified once again as the Hamas militants fired hundreds of thousands of rockets and barrages of missiles in the direction of Israeli territory from the besieged strip of Gaza, killing dozens in an unprecedented attack.

Israel’s Defence Forces (IDF) vowed a robust response against the Hamas militants to protect the sovereignty of the state of Israel and its people. As Israel as declared ‘state of war’, here are 10 things we need to know about the Israel-Palestinian conflict dating back to several years of hostilities during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

10 things about Israel-Palestine conflict:

1. On October 7, the Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, in a recorded message, said that the Hamas militants had commenced the operation against Israel, labelling it a 'heroic epic' and detailing that Israel crossed red lines on the military actions at the Al-Aqsa Mosque or Temple Mount, considered holy by both Muslims and the Jews. "The Zionist aggression reached its peak during the past days, as thousands of settlers desecrated the Al-Aqsa,” the Hamas Jihadist leader asserted, adding that the aggression in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is out of control. 
    
2. As the Palestinian Islamist terrorist faction declared an all-out war, the Israeli Army declared a “state of readiness” launching Operation Iron Swords, as a barrage of rockets were fired toward Israel. 
    
3. According to the Israeli Defence Forces, the Hamas terrorist organisation has been waging an armed conflict against the state of Israel to establish an ‘independent Palestine’ having taken the besieged Gaza Strip ‘by force’ in 2007. 
    
4. In the last few years, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist jihadist group, dug underground military tunnels within Gaza and intensified the cross-border assault tunnels reaching into Israeli residential areas and capturing or killing the Israelis. 
    
5. Hamas, which uses the civilian population as shields in military operations, has been operating from inside the urban areas to support offensive and defensive operations. They fire ground-to-ground missiles and machine guns into Israel and detonate mines and other explosives on the fence line.
    
6. At the Erez crossing, where Hamas militants stormed into an Israeli military outpost, the IDF had neutralised over 20 underground cross-border tunnels that connected the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings during the May 2021 Gaza conflict. Hamas used to import military equipment and materials and conducted smuggling operations into the Gaza Strip via Israel and Egypt.
    
7. "We are embarking on a long and difficult war. The war was forced upon us by a murderous attack by Hamas," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. His cabinet made a "series of operational decisions aimed at bringing about the destruction of the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.” 
    
8. The former chief of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Service, Efraim Halevy, reportedly said that the number of rockets fired by Palestinian militants was “never seen before.” He added that it was a “unique attack” and “the first time” that Hamas penetrated “deep into Israel and to take control of villages” from Gaza. 
    
9. Amid the speculations about the Iranian involvement in backing Hamas, the US said that it cannot yet verify whether Iran played a direct role in the attack on Israel. The Biden administration is planning to look into the matter. It is “too early to say whether the state of Iran was directly involved,” the official said. “We’re going to be looking at them very closely,” a US official was reported saying.  
    
10. The conflict is rooted in the conclusion of the British Mandate for Palestine and Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948 and its establishment as a sovereign state and the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, subsided with heavy casualties on both sides.