The following timeline was assembled by Natural News researchers in an effort to document the undeniable fact that the Oct. 7th attack on Israel by Hamas “did not occur in a vacuum” as the UN Secretary General correctly stated.

For the record, we absolutely condemn the Hamas attacks on Israel a despicable display of violence against civilians. At the same time, it is no exaggeration to describe Gaza as a “concentration camp” run by Israel, meaning what occurred on Oct. 7th was more of a “prison break” than nation-on-nation violence, especially given that neither the United Nations nor Israel recognizes Palestine as a nation itself. When Israel says it “has a right to self-defense,” that is true when you are talking about being attacked by other nations. The situation is far different, however, when Israel is the occupying force, having displaced millions of Palestinians and forced them into a tightly-controlled concentration camp known as the Gaza Strip, over which Israel exerts near-total police state control.

Oct. 7th was not the beginning of history between Israel and Palestine. In fact, it was the culmination of generations of extreme racism, violence, ethnic cleansing and genocidal actions carried out against the Palestinian people by Israel. Here’s a summary timeline of that history. Each entry is credited to the appropriate source, and most of the links here refer to Amnesty International published documents.

Dec. 11, 1948 – UN Addresses Palestinian Displacement

Over the course of the Arab-Israeli war, at least 700,000 Palestinian refugees flee their homes in an exodus known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Israel wins the war, retaining the territory provided to it by the United Nations and capturing some of the areas designated for the Palestinian state. Israel gains control of West Jerusalem, Egypt gains the Gaza Strip, and Jordan gains the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Old City and its historic Jewish quarter.

In 1948, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) passes Resolution 194, which calls for the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. Palestinians will later point to Resolution 194 as having established a “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The specific parameters of this return are debated in the decades that follow, including among the large number of descendants from the 1948 refugees and the three hundred thousand Palestinians who will flee their homes during the June 1967 war.

June 5, 1967 – The Six-Day War

Israel and several of its Arab neighbors fight the Six-Day War. Israel wins a decisive victory: it suffers seven hundred casualties; its adversaries suffer nearly twenty thousand. Israel emerges with control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—areas inhabited primarily by Palestinians—as well as all of East Jerusalem. Israel also takes control of Syria’s Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, which is part of Egypt. Israel will stay in the Sinai Peninsula until April 1982.

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