The war in Gaza has been at the top of the news cycle for nearly two years. However, 20 years ago this week, Israel expelled thousands of Israelis from thriving communities in Gaza and northern Samaria in a move that was supposed to bring peace.
What happened since then is a much different outcome.
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In 2005, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted 21 Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip and four in Samaria, or the northern West Bank, forcing ten thousand Israelis out of their homes.
Known as “The Disengagement,” it was a land concession that was billed as the next step to peace with the Palestinians under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
Just two years later, the terror group Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in a violent intra-Palestinian battle for control.
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In the ensuing years, Hamas and other terror groups have launched tens of thousands of rockets, carried out many suicide bombings, and dug numerous terror tunnels.
The murder of nearly 1,200 Israelis in the Oct. 7th, 2023, cross-border attack from the Gaza Strip is deemed the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. It has prompted many Israelis to call for a return to Gaza.
Avi Abelow from pulseofisrael.com told CBN News, “People actually don’t know Gaza is Jewish. Jews have lived in Gaza, on and off, for thousands of years.”
Gaza is first mentioned in Genesis, and later (Joshua 15) is named as part of the inheritance given to the biblical tribe of Judah.
Abelow notes that even in the early 1900s, Jews were living in Gaza.
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“Before Israel was established in the 1940s, there were Jewish communities in Gaza,” Abelow said. “Unfortunately, the British, because they didn’t want to defend the Jews, they basically expelled them. They said, ‘Run away,’ because we were being killed by the pogroms by the Arab Muslims in the late 1920s and the 1930s.”
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