Editing Palestine (section)

=====2006 Elections=====
Sheik Yassin, the founder of Hamas, was killed in a targeted helicopter strike in 2004. His bodyguards and nine bystanders were also killed. Soon after, his deputy Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi took over, but was soon also killed by a helicopter strike, along with his son and a handful of other civilians. Following this, Ismail Haniyeh, who appointed head of Yassin's office in 1997 and ran as the representative of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority's 2006 elections, took charge of Hamas.

Yasser Arafat died in 2005, and Mahmoud Abbas was elected to lead the Fatah party.

American President George W. Bush called for the Palestinian Authority to hold elections in Gaza in 2006. They did, and the PA thought Hamas wouldn't participate, leaving only the Fatah party (part of the PLO) to win.

Hamas won the election with Haniyeh as their leader, and have remained in power ever since, working in tandem with various other parties and armed forces in Palestine. The Carter Center and other independent international observers certified the election outcome as fair and democratic. This was the Carter Center's third time observing Palestinian elections in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Western governments refused to recognize Hamas as the winner of the 2006 elections, and designated the Islamic Resistance a terror organization. Hamas refused to recognize Israel while Fatah and the PA supported a two-state solution. However, the two camps met in Mecca and established a unity government in November 2006. Before long, the sparse violence that cropped up in Gaza since October 2006 led to Hamas raids on PA security compounds. In February 2007, Haniyeh and the Hamas-led cabinet resigned but was reappointed by Abbas, who attempted to establish a new unity government. In March of 2007 Israel vowed to continue the sanctions and military operations, causing Hamas to refuse cessation of rocket fire towards Israel. 

Finally, Hamas had taken control over the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority by force after the election during a battle with Fatah in June 2007. The war killed over a hundred people, and injured more than 300 others. It was only after this unfavorable outcome in June that Israel imposed a brutal, vicious, and inhumane blockade upon the Gaza Strip as a form of collective punishment of Palestinians.  In response, Israel collectively punished Gazans by restricting movement/travel, blockading air, land, and sea; Israeli representatives boasted about putting Gazans on a "diet", which consisted of precisely calculating how many calories the average man, woman, and child needed to survive at the very minimum; and restricting imports on important foods such as meat and medical goods. Chocolate, seeds, nuts, dried fruit, fresh meat; paper, glass/plastic/metal containers, tractor and hatchery parts, fishing nets, heaters; horses, donkeys, cattle, chicks, and goats; as well as concrete, iron, wood, tar, and plaster for construction were all prohibited by the Israeli blockade, which continues to this day.

The Zionist blockade on Gaza could easily be compared to "Der Hungerplan", Hitler's plan to starve 30 million Ukrainians, Russians, and Slavs in order to resettle Ukraine and Czechoslovakia with Germans. The food surplus was redirected during the 1940-41 plan to German soldiers and civilians. The plan was to starve and evict the native population in order to realize Hitlerian Lebensraum policy. It has been established above that Zionists were highly involved with the Nazis and admired many aspects of their ideology both in theory and in practice, so the comparison is not especially taboo.

In 2006, Israel initiated the Second Lebanese war after Hezbollah rockets continued in the fashion of the PLO's rocket fire. Hezbollah's rockets were not hand-made, like most Palestinian mortars and bombs. These were the same Katyusha rockets used by the Soviets and their allies. The Israeli Air Force was regularly surveilling and flying over southern Lebanon, yet failed to stop Hezbollah rocket fire even after bombing Lebanese military installations and artillery. Hundreds of tanks were deployed but with no element of surprise; the IDF hadn't fought a ground war for decades and launched frontal assaults of Lebanese positions, taking no prisons and killing less than a thousand-- even the most mainstream Israeli historians call the operation "clumsy, heavy-handed, and slow", not to mention "disappointing." Israeli public opinion turned against the IDF (and by extension the IAF), albeit for stopping just short of a ground invasion. The war lasted 34 days, but had rippling geopolitical costs-- Hezbollah became more aggressive and their relations with Hamas and the PLO were strengthened. Israel quickly gave up the Lebanese land it was occupying after only a few weeks, during which fighting ceased. Over the next decade they would exact "revenge" on Arabs collectively for the Second Lebanese War by occasionally "mowing the lawn".