Israel History

"...The earliest archaeological artifact to mention the word "Israel" is the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt (dated to the late 13th century BCE).

...the first Kingdom of Israel was established around the 11th century BCE. Subsequent Israelite kingdoms and states ruled intermittently over the next four hundred years...

...The name "Israel" in ...refers to the patriarch Jacob, whose ...twelve sons became the ancestors of the Israelites, also known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel

With successive Persian rule, the region, divided between Syria-Coele province and later the autonomous Yehud Medinata, was ...largely dominated by Judeans.

Incorporated into Ptolemaic and finally Seleucid Empires, southern Levant was heavily hellenized, building the tensions between Judeans and Greeks. The conflict erupted in 167 BCE with the Maccabean Revolt, which succeeded in establishing an independent Hasmonean Kingdom in Judah, which later expanded over much of modern Israel...

The Roman Empire invaded the region in 63 BCE, first taking control of Syria, and then intervening in the Hasmonean civil war. The struggle between pro-Roman and pro-Parthian factions in Judea eventually led to the installation of Herod the Great and consolidation of the Herodian Kingdom as a vassal Judean state of Rome.

...With the decline of Herodians, Judea, transformed into a Roman province, became the site of a violent struggle of Jews against Greco-Romans, culminating in the Jewish-Roman Wars, ending in wide-scale destruction, expulsions, and genocide.

Jewish presence in the region significantly dwindled after the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire in 132 CE.  Nevertheless, there was a continuous small Jewish presence and Galilee became its religious center.

...After the Persian conquest and the installation of a short-lived Jewish Commonwealth in 614 CE, the Byzantine Empire reinstalled its rule in 625 CE...

In 635 CE, the region, including Jerusalem, was conquered by Arabs. It remained under Muslim control and predominately Muslim occupancy for the next 1300 years.  Control of the region transferred between the Umayyads, Abbasids, and Crusaders throughout the next six centuries, before the area was conquered in 1260 by the Mamluk Sultanate.

In 1218, England became the first European nation to require Jews to wear a marking badge.

Between 1219 and 1272, 49 levies were imposed on Jews for a total of 200,000 marks, a vast sum of money.

In the duchy of Gascony in 1287, King Edward I ordered the local Jews expelled. All their property was seized by the crown and all outstanding debts payable to Jews were transferred to the King’s name.

In 1290, King Edward I issued an edict expelling all Jews from England. The expulsion edict remained in force for the rest of the Middle Ages. The edict was not an isolated incident, but the culmination of over 200 years of increased persecution. Oliver Cromwell permitted Jews to return to England in 1657, over 350 years since their banishment by Edward I...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion

...During waves of persecution in Medieval Europe, many Jews found refuge in Muslim lands. For instance, Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula were invited to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they would often form a prosperous model minority of merchants acting as intermediaries for their Muslim rulers...

...After the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, some communities settled in Palestine.

In 1516, the region was conquered by the Ottoman Empire; it remained under Turkish rule until the end of the First World War, when Britain defeated the Ottoman forces and set up a military administration across the former Ottoman Syria.

During the 16th century, Jewish communities struck roots in the Four Holy Cities—Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and Safed—and in 1697, Rabbi Yehuda Hachasid led a group of 1,500 Jews to Jerusalem. In the second half of the 18th century, Eastern European opponents of Hasidism, known as the Perushim, settled in Palestine.

Through the centuries, the territory was known by a variety of other names, including Judea, Samaria, Southern Syria, Syria Palaestina, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Iudaea Province, Coele-Syria, Retjenu, and Canaan.

...The first wave of modern Jewish migration to Ottoman-ruled Palestine, known as the First Aliyah, began in 1881, as Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.

...The Second Aliyah (1904–14), began after the Kishinev pogrom; some 40,000 Jews settled in Palestine, although nearly half of them left eventually.  Both the first and second waves of migrants were mainly Orthodox Jews...

The Jewish Legion, a group primarily of Zionist volunteers, assisted in the British conquest of Palestine in 1917.

During World War I, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sent the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that stated that Britain intended for the creation of a Jewish homeland within the Palestinian Mandate.

...From 1920 the whole region was known as Palestine (under British Mandate) until the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948.  Arab opposition to British rule and Jewish immigration led to the 1920 Palestine riots...

In 1922, the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate over Palestine under terms similar to the Balfour Declaration. The population of the area at this time was predominantly Arab and Muslim, with Jews accounting for about 11%, Christians 9.5%.

The Third (1919–1923) and Fourth Aliyahs (1924–1929) brought an additional 100,000 Jews to Palestine. Finally, the rise of Nazism and the increasing persecution of Jews in the 1930s led to the Fifth Aliyah, with an influx of a quarter of a million Jews. This was a major cause of the Arab revolt of 1936–1939 and led the British to introduce restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine with the White Paper of 1939. With countries around the world turning away Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, a clandestine movement known as Aliyah Bet was organized to bring Jews to Palestine.

...During World War II, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya came under Nazi or Vichy French occupation and these Jews were subject to various persecution. In Libya, Axis powers established labor camps to which many Jews were forcibly deported.  In other areas Nazi propaganda targeted Arab populations in order to incite them against British or French rule.

In 1941, immediately following the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi War, riots known as the Farhud broke out in Baghdad in the power vacuum following the collapse of the pro-Axis government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani while the city was in a state of instability. 180 Jews were killed and another 240 wounded; 586 Jewish-owned businesses were looted and 99 Jewish houses were destroyed.

In 1942, German troops fighting the Allies in North Africa occupied the Jewish quarter of Benghazi, plundering shops and deporting more than 2,000 Jews across the desert.

By the end of World War II, the Jewish population of Palestine had increased to 33% of the total population.

After World War II, Britain found itself in fierce conflict with the Jewish community...

...hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees sought a new life far from their destroyed communities in Europe. ...In 1947, the British government announced it would withdraw from Mandatory Palestine, stating it was unable to arrive at a solution acceptable to both Arabs and Jews.

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recommended the adoption and implementation of the partition plan of [British controlled] Mandatory Palestine.

...On 1 December 1947, the Arab Higher Committee proclaimed a three-day strike, and Arab bands began attacking Jewish targets.  The Jews were initially on the defensive as civil war broke out, but gradually moved onto the offensive.

The Palestinian Arab economy collapsed and 250,000 Palestinian-Arabs fled or were expelled.

On 14 May 1948, [Israel] declared "the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel," a state independent upon the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine, 15 May 1948.

...The following day, the armies of four Arab countries—Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq—entered what had been British Mandatory Palestine, launching the 1948 Arab–Israeli War; Saudi Arabia sent a military contingent to operate under Egyptian command...

After a year of fighting, a ceasefire was declared and temporary borders, known as the Green Line, were established.  Jordan annexed what became known as the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip. The United Nations estimated that more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during the conflict from what would become Israel.

In 1948, about 38,000 Jews lived in Libya.  The pogroms continued in June 1948, when 15 Jews were killed and 280 Jewish homes destroyed.

In 1948, approximately 800,000 Jews were living in lands which now make up the Arab world (excluding Israel). Of these, just under two-thirds lived in the French-controlled Maghreb region, 15-20% in the Kingdom of Iraq, approximately 10% in the Kingdom of Egypt and approximately 7% in the Kingdom of Yemen. A further 200,000 lived in Pahlavi Iran and the Republic of Turkey.

...The first large-scale exoduses took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily in Iraq, Yemen and Libya, with up to 90% of these communities leaving within a few years...

The reasons for the exodus included push factors, such as persecution, antisemitism, political instability, poverty and expulsion; together with pull factors, such as the desire to fulfill Zionist yearnings or find a better economic status and a secure home in Europe or the Americas. The history of the exodus is politicized, given its proposed relevance to a final settlement in the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. When presenting the history, those who view the Jewish exodus as equivalent to the 1948 Palestinian exodus, emphasize push factors such as cases of anti-Jewish violence and forced expulsions, and refer to those affected as "refugees". Those who argue that the exodus does not equate to the Palestinian exodus emphasize pull factors such as the actions of local Zionist agents aiming to fulfil the One Million Plan...

In 1947, rioters killed at least 80 Jews in Aden in southern Yemen. ...there were about 63,000 Jews in Yemen in 1948. ...The Israeli government's Operation Magic Carpet evacuated around 44,000 Jews from Yemen to Israel in 1949 and 1950.

...the Iraqi government was motivated [to expel its 120,000 Jews] by "economic considerations, chief of which was that almost all the property of departing Jews reverted to the state treasury"...

...Israel was admitted as a member of the United Nations by majority vote on 11 May 1949.

...the One Million Plan, led to an an influx of Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, many of whom faced persecution and expulsion from their original countries.  Consequently, the population of Israel rose from 800,000 to two million between 1948 and 1958.

Between 1948 and 1970, approximately 1,151,029 Jewish refugees relocated to Israel  ...[some] expelled from their homelands, such as British and French Jews in Egypt after the Suez Crisis.

The Iraqi government took in only 5,000 of the c.700,000 Palestinians who became refugees in 1948-49 and refused to submit to American and British pressure to admit more.

...In the 1950s, Israel was frequently attacked by Palestinian fedayeen, mainly from the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, leading to several Israeli counter-raids. In 1950 Egypt closed the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping and tensions mounted as armed clashes took place along Israel's borders. In 1956, Israel joined a secret alliance with Great Britain and France aimed at regaining control of the Suez Canal, which the Egyptians had nationalized. Israel overran the Sinai Peninsula but was pressured to withdraw by the United Nations in return for guarantees of Israeli shipping rights in the Red Sea and the Canal.

In 1951, the Iraqi Government made advocating Zionism or belonging to a Zionist organization a crime and ordered the expulsion of Jews who refused to sign a statement of anti-Zionism.

In October 1956, when the Suez Crisis erupted, ...1,000 [Egyptian] Jews were arrested and 500 Jewish businesses were seized by the government. A statement branding the Jews as "Zionists and enemies of the state" was read out in the mosques of Cairo and Alexandria.[citation needed] Jewish bank accounts were confiscated and many Jews lost their jobs. Lawyers, engineers, doctors and teachers were not allowed to work in their professions. Thousands of Jews were ordered to leave the country. They were allowed to take only one suitcase and a small sum of cash, and forced to sign declarations "donating" their property to the Egyptian government.

Since 1964, Arab countries, concerned over Israeli plans to divert waters of the Jordan River into the coastal plain, had been trying to divert the headwaters to deprive Israel of water resources, provoking tensions between Israel on the one hand, and Syria and Lebanon on the other.

Arab nationalists led by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser refused to recognize Israel, and called for its destruction.

By 1966, Israeli-Arab relations had deteriorated to the point of actual battles taking place between Israeli and Arab forces.

In 1967, Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers, stationed in the Sinai Peninsula since 1957, and announced a partial blockade of Israel's access to the Red Sea. In May 1967 a number of Arab states began to mobilize their forces.  Israel saw these actions as a casus belli. On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. In a Six-Day War, Israeli military superiority was clearly demonstrated against their more numerous Arab foes. Israel succeeded in capturing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

Jerusalem's boundaries were enlarged, incorporating East Jerusalem, and the 1949 Green Line became the administrative boundary between Israel and the occupied territories.

From the 1950s onward tensions surrounding water politics had escalated.  Israel tapped the Jordan River (and the Sea of Galilee) by canal for irrigation of the Southern Negev desert, and Syria started the Headwater Diversion Plan (Jordan River) in order to thwart Israel's plans to use the water.

Cross-border conflicts over water had preceded the war by years, without any permanent political resolution.

...since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, disputes over Palestinian water rights has been one of the most difficult conflicts to resolve...

Following the war, Israel faced much internal resistance from the Palestinians and Egyptian hostilities in the Sinai. Most important among the various Palestinian and Arab groups was the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), established in 1964, which initially committed itself to "armed struggle as the only way to liberate the homeland".

In 1969, about 50 of the Jews who remained in Iraq were executed; 11 were publicly executed after show trials and hundred thousand Iraqis marched past the bodies in a carnival-like atmosphere.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Palestinian groups launched a wave of attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets around the world, including a massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. The Israeli government responded with an assassination campaign against the organizers of the massacre, a bombing and a raid on the PLO headquarters in Lebanon.

In 1970 the Libyan government issued new laws which confiscated all the assets of Libya's Jews, issuing in their stead 15-year bonds. However, when the bonds matured no compensation was paid.

Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi has argued that Jews from Arab lands are not refugees at all and that Israel is using their claims in order to counterbalance to those of Palestinian refugees against it.  Ashrawi said that “If Israel is their homeland, then they are not ‘refugees’; they are emigrants who returned either voluntarily or due to a political decision.”

A body representing the Jewish refugees, estimated in 2006, that Jewish property abandoned in Arab countries would be valued at more than $100 billion, later revising their estimate in 2007 to $300 billion. They also estimated Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Muslim_countries

On 6 October 1973, as Jews were observing Yom Kippur, the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched a surprise attack against Israeli forces in the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. The war ended on 26 October with Israel successfully repelling Egyptian and Syrian forces but suffering significant losses.

In July 1976 Israeli commandos carried out a rescue mission which succeeded in rescuing 102 hostages who were being held by Palestinian guerrillas at Entebbe International Airport close to Kampala, Uganda.

The 1977 ...Menachem Begin's Likud party took control... Later that year, Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat made a trip to Israel and spoke before the Knesset in what was the first recognition of Israel by an Arab head of state.  In the two years that followed, Sadat and Begin signed the Camp David Accords (1978) and the Israel–Egypt Peace Treaty (1979).  Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula and agreed to enter negotiations over an autonomy for Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

On 11 March 1978, a PLO guerrilla raid from Lebanon led to the Coastal Road Massacre, in which 38 Israeli civilians were killed and 71 injured. Israel responded by launching an invasion of southern Lebanon to destroy the PLO bases south of the Litani River. Most PLO fighters withdrew, but Israel was able to secure southern Lebanon until a UN force and the Lebanese army could take over. The PLO soon resumed its policy of attacks against Israel. In the next few years, the PLO infiltrated the south and kept up a sporadic shelling across the border. Israel carried out numerous retaliatory attacks by air and on the ground.

...Begin's government provided incentives for Israelis to settle in the occupied West Bank, increasing friction with the Palestinians in that area.  The Basic Law: Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel, passed in 1980, was believed by some to reaffirm Israel's 1967 annexation of Jerusalem by government decree, and reignited international controversy over the status of the city. ...In 1981 Israel annexed the Golan Heights, although annexation was not recognized internationally.

...The Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt in 1982.

...Following a series of PLO attacks in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the bases from which the PLO launched attacks and missiles into northern Israel.  In the first six days of fighting, the Israelis destroyed the military forces of the PLO in Lebanon and decisively defeated the Syrians.

The First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule, broke out in 1987, with waves of uncoordinated demonstrations and violence occurring in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Over the following six years, the Intifada became more organised and included economic and cultural measures aimed at disrupting the Israeli occupation.

...Responding to continuing PLO guerrilla raids into northern Israel, Israel launched another punitive raid into southern Lebanon in 1988.

...the Hamas Charter affirmed in 1988, that Hamas was founded to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation and to establish an Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Hamas' 1988 charter states that Hamas "strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine" (Article Six). Article Thirty-One of the Charter states: "Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions—Islam, Christianity and Judaism—to coexist in peace and quiet with each other."

The charter states "our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious" and calls for the eventual creation of an Islamic state in Palestine, in place of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and the obliteration or dissolution of Israel.

"The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews [and kill them]; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!"

The document also quotes Islamic religious texts to provide justification for fighting against and killing the Jews of Israel, presenting the Arab–Israeli conflict as an inherently irreconcilable struggle between Jews and Muslims, and Judaism and Islam, adding that the only way to engage in this struggle between "truth and falsehood" is through Islam and by means of jihad, until victory or martyrdom. The Charter adds that "renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion" of Islam.

...During the 1991 Gulf War, the PLO supported Saddam Hussein and Iraqi Scud missile attacks against Israel. Despite public outrage, Israel heeded US calls to refrain from hitting back and did not participate in that war.

In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin became Prime Minister following an election in which his party called for compromise with Israel's neighbors.  The following year, Shimon Peres on behalf of Israel, and Mahmoud Abbas for the PLO, signed the Oslo Accords, which gave the Palestinian National Authority the right to govern parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  The PLO also recognized Israel's right to exist and pledged an end to terrorism.

In 1994, the Israel–Jordan Treaty of Peace was signed, making Jordan the second Arab country to normalize relations with Israel.  Arab public support for the Accords was damaged by the continuation of Israeli settlements and checkpoints, and the deterioration of economic conditions.  Israeli public support for the Accords waned as Israel was struck by Palestinian suicide attacks.  Finally, while leaving a peace rally in November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far-right-wing Jew who opposed the Accords.

At the end of the 1990s, Israel, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, withdrew from Hebron, and signed the Wye River Memorandum, giving greater control to the Palestinian National Authority.

The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas affiliated military wing, has launched attacks on Israel, against both civilian and military targets.  Attacks on civilian targets have included rocket attacks and, from 1993 to 2006, suicide bombings.

Ehud Barak, elected Prime Minister in 1999, began the new millennium by withdrawing forces from Southern Lebanon and conducting negotiations with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and U.S. President Bill Clinton at the 2000 Camp David Summit. During the summit, Barak offered a plan for the establishment of a Palestinian state, but Yasser Arafat rejected it.

After the collapse of the talks the Second Intifada began, which was allegedly pre-planned by Yasser Arafat.

Sharon became prime minister in a 2001 special election. During his tenure, Sharon carried out his plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip and also spearheaded the construction of the Israeli West Bank barrier, defeating the Intifada.

In July 2006, a Hezbollah artillery assault on Israel's northern border communities and a cross-border abduction of two Israeli soldiers precipitated the month-long Second Lebanon War.

On 6 September 2007, Israeli Air Force destroyed a nuclear reactor in Syria.

In May 2008, Israel confirmed it had been discussing a peace treaty with Syria for a year, with Turkey as a go-between. However, at the end of the year, Israel entered another conflict as a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel collapsed. The Gaza War lasted three weeks and ended after Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire.  Hamas announced its own ceasefire, with its own conditions of complete withdrawal and opening of border crossings. Despite neither the rocket launchings nor Israeli retaliatory strikes having completely stopped, the fragile ceasefire remained in order.

In what it said was a response to more than a hundred Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israeli cities, Israel began an operation in Gaza on 14 November 2012, lasting eight days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel

The Israeli disengagement from Gaza ...was the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza, and the dismantling of all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005.

On March 17, the Southern Command of the Israel Defense Forces issued a military order prohibiting Israeli citizens not living in the Gaza Strip settlements from taking up residence there.

The disengagement was ...adopted by the government on June 6, 2004 and enacted in August 2005.

On August 7, 2005, Netanyahu resigned just prior to the cabinet ratification of the first phase of the disengagement plan by a vote of 17 to 5. Netanyahu blamed the Israeli government for moving "blindly along" with the disengagement by not taking into account the expected upsurge in terrorism.

On August 10, in his first speech before the Knesset following his resignation, Netanyahu spoke of the necessity for Knesset members to oppose the proposed disengagement.

"Only we in the Knesset are able to stop this evil. Everything that the Knesset has decided, it is also capable of changing. I am calling on all those who grasp the danger: Gather strength and do the right thing. I don't know if the entire move can be stopped, but it still might be stopped in its initial stages. [Don't] give [the Palestinians] guns, don't give them rockets, don't give them a sea port, and don't give them a huge base for terror."

Those Israeli citizens who refused to accept government compensation packages and voluntarily vacate their homes prior to the August 15, 2005 deadline, were evicted by Israeli security forces over a period of several days.

On August 31, the Knesset voted to withdraw from the Gaza-Egypt border and to allow Egyptian deployment of border police along the demilitarized Egyptian side of the border, revising the previously stated intent to maintain Israeli control of the border.

During the pullout, hundreds of people were arrested for rioting, and criminal charges were filed against 482 of them.

The IDF also began withdrawing its forces in the Gaza Strip, and had withdrawn 95% of its military equipment by September 1. On September 7, the IDF announced that it planned to advance its full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip...

The eviction of all residents, demolition of the residential buildings and evacuation of associated security personnel from the Gaza Strip was completed by September 12, 2005.

After Israel's withdrawal, the Palestinians were given control over the Gaza Strip, except for the borders, the airspace and the territorial waters.

Following Israel's withdrawal, Palestinian mobs entered the settlements...

...Less than 24 hours after the withdrawal, Palestinian Authority bulldozers began to demolish the remaining synagogues. The settlements' greenhouses, which were supposed to be left intact by Israel, but half of which were demolished by their owners before leaving, were also looted by Palestinian mobs. Palestinian Authority security forces attempted to stop them, but did not have enough manpower to be effective. In some places, there was no security, while some police officers joined the looters.

...In December 2006, news reports indicated that a number of Palestinians were leaving the Gaza Strip, due to political disorder and "economic pressure" there.  In January 2007, fighting continued between Hamas and Fatah, without any progress towards resolution or reconciliation.  Fighting spread to several points in the Gaza Strip with both factions attacking each other.

In June 2007 the Fatah–Hamas conflict reached its height and Hamas took control over the Gaza Strip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza
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Since 2007, Hamas has governed the Gaza Strip, after it won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Parliament in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections and defeated the Fatah political organization in a series of violent clashes.

...Tensions over control of Palestinian security forces soon erupted into the 2007 Battle of Gaza, after which Hamas retained control of Gaza while its officials were ousted from government positions in the West Bank.

Israel and Egypt then imposed an economic blockade on Gaza, on the grounds that Fatah forces were no longer providing security there.

In June 2008, as part of an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire, Hamas ceased rocket attacks on Israel and made some efforts to prevent attacks by other organizations.

After a four-month calm, the conflict escalated when Israel carried out a military action with the stated aim of preventing an abduction planned by Hamas, using a tunnel that had been dug under the border security fence, and killed seven Hamas operatives.

In retaliation, Hamas attacked Israel with a barrage of rockets.

In late December 2008, Israel attacked Gaza, withdrawing its forces from the territory in mid-January 2009.

...Hostilities resumed between November 14-21, 2012.

...Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, deputy chairman of Hamas political bureau, said in 2014 that "Hamas will not recognize Israel", adding "this is a red line that cannot be crossed".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
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"...on 2 June 2014, a new Palestinian Authority government was inaugurated, following the April reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas endorsed the new government even though it was given no cabinet posts...

Abbas ...ordered his security forces to continue to co-operate with Israel against Hamas. The reconciliation agreement was being put under serious pressure.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mouin-rabbani/israel-mows-the-lawn
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On 12 June 2014, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered. IDF initiated an operation in the West Bank aimed to find them (not until June 30 were their bodies found). Israeli authorities have named two Hamas members as prime suspects: Amer Abu Aysha and Marwan Kawasm."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
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"On the night of 6 July, an Israeli air raid resulted in the death of seven Hamas militants. Hamas responded with sustained missile attacks deep into Israel, escalating further as Israel launched its full-scale onslaught.

For the past year Hamas had been in a precarious position: it had lost its headquarters in Damascus and preferential status in Iran as a result of its refusal to give open support to the Syrian regime, and faced unprecedented levels of hostility from Egypt’s new military ruler. The underground tunnel economy between Egypt and Gaza had been systematically dismantled by the Egyptians, and for the first time since seizing control of the territory in 2007 it was no longer able regularly to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of government employees.

The reconciliation agreement with Fatah was its way of bartering its political programme in exchange for its own survival: in return for conceding the political arena to Abbas, Hamas would retain control of the Gaza Strip indefinitely, have its public sector placed on the PA payroll and see the border crossing with Egypt reopened."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mouin-rabbani/israel-mows-the-lawn