• tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 months ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018–2019_Gaza_border_protests

    The 2018–2019 Gaza border protests, also known as the Great March of Return (Arabic: مسیرة العودة الكبرى, romanized: Masīra al-ʿawda al-kubrā), were a series of demonstrations held each Friday in the Gaza Strip near the Gaza-Israel border from 30 March 2018 until 27 December 2019,[13][14][15] in which Israeli forces killed a total of 223 Palestinians.[4][13] The demonstrators demanded that the Palestinian refugees must be allowed to return to lands they were displaced from in what is now Israel.

    223 killed, included 46 children, and over 9000 injured

    Times of Israel: For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces

    Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.

    According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.