Anne Irfan on the Repetition of History and How the Past Informs the Present
As the Trump administration continues to fete the supposed success of the Gaza ceasefire, the Israeli occupation of Gaza is ongoing. And while the scale of the last two years’ violence is unprecedented, the fact of it is not new. Prior to October 2023, Israel had occupied both Gaza and the West Bank since 1967—the longest-running military occupation in modern history. In the case of Gaza, there is an even earlier antecedent: in 1956, Israel invaded and occupied the Gaza Strip for the very first time, withdrawing after four months. Despite being relatively short-lived and often overlooked in analyses, this first, forgotten occupation of Gaza established lasting precedents for Israel’s military regime.
The parallels between 1956-57 and 2023-25 are striking. In both cases, Israel sought to justify its aggression as a necessary security measure to protect its southern communities. In 2023, of course, Israel’s assault on Gaza followed the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, in which Palestinian militants killed 1,195 people in Israel and kidnapped another 251, the majority civilians. In 1956, the Israeli government cited the need for self-defense against Palestinian so-called “infiltrators” who were crossing over from Gaza in ambush operations. In first half of that decade, Palestinian militants from Gaza and Sinai had killed 403 Israelis, including both civilians and soldiers. Another 564 Israelis were killed in raids carried out by Palestinians coming from the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria in the same period.
Although Israel’s first occupation of Gaza ended after four months, it served as a crucial laboratory for what was to come.
Yet historians have since shown decisively that the majority of Palestinians crossing the armistice line in the 1950s were not militants conducting raids but unarmed refugees seeking to return to their lost homes to retrieve belongings, tend to their crops, or find loved ones. In 1948, the establishment of the state of Israel had involved the forced displacement and expulsion of at least 750,000 Palestinians, with more than 200,000 seeking refuge in Gaza. These refugees were overwhelmingly keen to return to their old homes—a right recognized by the UN in General Assembly Resolution 194 but continuously denied by Israel. Drawing no distinction between the various Palestinians crossing the armistice lines, Israeli forces killed as many as 5,000 “infiltrators” in the early 1950s, the majority unarmed. When its army entered Gaza in late 1956, the Israeli government argued that national security interests required it to control the Strip.
Israel’s first occupation of Gaza was characterized by war crimes, massacres, and expulsions. Formally announcing a policy of collective punishment, the army carried out “screening” operations that were ostensibly designed to locate militants but in reality entailed widespread indiscriminate violence. Testimonies and UN investigations attested to massacres, forcible disappearances and the use of Palestinian children as human shields—all practices that would re-occur during future Israeli offensives in Gaza, with particular intensity from 2023.
Over the course of four months in 1956-57, Israeli forces killed as many as 1,500 Palestinians in Gaza. Combined with the numbers injured, detained or tortured, at least one percent of the Strip’s population suffered first-hand from Israeli violence during the first occupation. These figures, while shocking, unfortunately pale in comparison to those from the recent war, now widely recognized as a genocide. As of October 2025, the official Palestinian death toll from the last two years stands at more than 68,000 people, at least 80 percent of them civilians. According to some estimates the true death toll may be as much as 40 percent higher than this. Just under two million Palestinians—virtually the entire population of Gaza—have been displaced since October 2023, many repeatedly, and Israeli forces have damaged or destroyed more than 90 percent of homes in the Strip.
In what has become a recurring theme, Israel’s first occupation of Gaza was also enabled by Western powers. In the 1950s, this was not the US but the dying empires of Britain and France, which had dominated the Middle East for the first half of the century. Determined to stop the anti-imperial policies of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, British and French representatives met with Israeli officials in October 1956 to forge a secret agreement for a coordinated offensive against Egypt. Their plan enabled the Israeli seizure of Gaza, which had been administered by Egypt since 1948. After occupying Sinai, Britain and France succumbed to international pressure and withdrew their forces from Egypt in November. But founding Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was determined to claim the Gaza Strip, which he saw as rightfully belonging to Israel, and the Israeli army remained in control of it as 1957 dawned.
It is more vital than ever to consider this history in order to understand what could happen next.
As in 2025, the US played a critical role in this first occupation—but in a very different way. Far from enabling Israeli aggression as Biden and Trump have done in the 2020s, the Eisenhower White House decisively opposed it, albeit for reasons of global realpolitik rather than human rights. The week before Israel began its first occupation of Gaza, the Hungarian people had risen up against the Soviet-backed regime in Budapest, resulting in a ruthless Soviet crackdown that killed thousands. With much of the world horrified by the USSR’s brutality, Eisenhower was furious that the British-French-Israeli offensive was both diverting international attention and handing Moscow a PR victory by enabling it to speak about Western aggression in the Middle East. He demanded a full and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which took place in March 1957.
Although Israel’s first occupation of Gaza ended after four months, it served as a crucial laboratory for what was to come. A decade later, Israel re-occupied Gaza, this time along with the West Bank—an occupation that continues to this day. Many of the hallmarks of this longer-term occupation were taken from the blueprint Israel had first sketched out in 1956. It included plans to exploit Gaza’s agricultural resources, proposals for building illegal Israeli settlements, and initiatives to encourage “voluntary” permanent Palestinian emigration.
Seven decades later, these ideas are mainstream in both Israeli and US discourse. For two years now, figures from Israeli cabinet ministers to the US President have openly called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. While Trump’s recent 20-point plan stated that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza and those who leave will be free to return,” not a single exiled Palestinian has been allowed to return to the Strip since the ceasefire officially came into force. Meanwhile, the Israeli settler movement is openly plotting a long-term return to Gaza, seeking to reverse the evacuation of 8,000 settlers from the Strip that happened twenty years ago. With settlers in government, such plans cannot be dismissed as fringe. Nor are they a deviation; Israeli plans to occupy Gaza date back to the first decade of the state’s history, and were first implemented nearly 70 years ago. As the Trump White House continues to falsely claim it has brought peace to Palestine-Israel, it is more vital than ever to consider this history in order to understand what could happen next.
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A Short History of the Gaza Strip by Anne Irfan is available from W.W. Norton & Company.