'Operation Strong Cliff'[note 2][29][30][31]), and Battle of the Withered Grain (Arabic: معركة العصف المأكول, romanized: Maʿrakat al-ʿAṣf al-Maʾkūl[32][33]), was a military operation launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory that has been governed by Hamas since 2007.

[66] Nonetheless, the ICRC,[67] the UN[68] and various human rights organizations[69][70][71] consider Israel still to be the de facto occupying power due to its control of Gaza's borders, air space and territorial waters.

[96] The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict concluded that the operation was "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability".

[99][better source needed] In an interview with CNN, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the reconciliation talks were calls for Israel's destruction, and strongly opposed the idea of a unity government.

[132] Most of the outside world, including the European Union, Russia, China, India, Turkey, France and the United Kingdom, proved cautiously optimistic, and subsequently expressed their support for new arrangement.

"[137][138] Marwan Bishara, senior political analyst at Al Jazeera, alleged that Israel had hoped to disrupt the Palestinian national unity government between Fatah and Hamas by its operation.

[149] On 20 August, Saleh al-Arouri, an exiled Hamas leader based in Turkey, claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens: "Our goal was to ignite an intifada in the West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as within the 1948 borders...

[156] Withholding evidence in its possession suggesting that the teens had been killed immediately until 1 July,[38][115][157] Israel launched Operation Brother's Keeper, a large-scale crackdown of what it called Hamas's terrorist infrastructure and personnel in the West Bank,[158] ostensibly aimed at securing the release of the kidnapped teenagers.

[115] Overnight, on 30 June – 1 July, Israeli airstrikes struck 34 Gaza targets in what officials stated was a response to the Sunday rocketry,[187] while Stuart Greer reported the strikes were revenge for the deaths of the three youths.

Approximately five and a half hours prior to the ceasefire's effect, the IDF sighted 13 armed Hamas militants emerging from a Gazan tunnel on the Israeli side of the Gaza border.

[245][246] According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), over 273,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had been displaced as of 31 July 2014, of whom 236,375 (over eleven percent of the Gazan population) were taking shelter in 88 UNRWA schools.

[53][273][274] The Bedouin communities in the Negev, living in many habitations built illegally and unrecognised by the Israeli government, were classified as "open areas" and so their 200,000 residents did not have warning sirens or anti-rocket protection.

[332] According to The Washington Post, a percentage of Gazans held Hamas accountable for the humanitarian crisis and wanted the militants to stop firing rockets from their neighborhoods to avoid Israeli reaction.

[364] Amnesty International found evidence that "[d]uring the current hostilities, Hamas spokespeople reportedly urged residents in some areas of the Gaza Strip not to leave their homes after the Israeli military dropped leaflets and made phone calls warning people in the area to evacuate", and that international humanitarian law was clear in that "even if officials or fighters from Hamas or Palestinian armed groups associated with other factions did in fact direct civilians to remain in a specific location in order to shield military objectives from attacks, all of Israel's obligations to protect these civilians would still apply.

[373] According to The New York Times, "Of 44 cases initially referred to army fact-finding teams for preliminary examination, seven have been closed, including one involving the death of eight members of a family when their home was struck on 8 July, the first day of the Israeli air campaign, and others are pending.

[379] The IDF stated on 31 July that more than 280 Hamas rockets[52] malfunctioned and fell inside the Gaza strip, hitting sites including Al-Shifa Hospital and the Al-Shati refugee camp, killing at least 11 and wounding dozens.

[citation needed] On 26 May 2015, Amnesty International released a report saying that Hamas carried out extrajudicial killings, abductions and arrests of Palestinians and used the Al-Shifa Hospital to detain, interrogate and torture suspects.

[413][431] Using civilian structures to store munitions and launch attacks from is unlawful, and the Fourth Geneva Convention states that "The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.

[450][451] The IDF has released photographs which it says show civilians on rooftops, and a video of Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri saying "the fact that people are willing to sacrifice themselves against Israeli warplanes in order to protect their homes [...] is proving itself".

[467] According to one report, "nearly all the 2,500–3,000 rockets and mortars Hamas has fired at Israel since the start of the war seem to have been aimed at towns", including an attack on "a kibbutz collective farm close to the Gaza border", in which an Israeli child was killed.

[488][489] The Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel and the Palestinian territories protested what it called "blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities ... against visiting international journalists in Gaza", saying several had been harassed or questioned over information they reported.

"[507] The highest-ranking U.S. military officer, Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that "Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties".

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that "almost every piece of critical infrastructure, from electricity to water to sewage, has been seriously compromised by either direct hits from Israeli air strikes and shelling or collateral damage.

"[564] Reporters Without Borders and Al-Haq condemned the attacks, saying "an expert committee formed by the International Criminal Court's prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia, to assess the NATO bombing campaign of 1999, specified that a journalist or media organization is not a legitimate target merely because it broadcasts or disseminates propaganda.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay accused Israel of having "defied international law by attacking civilian areas of Gaza such as schools, hospitals, homes and U.N. facilities.

[570][571] Several of the key claims could not be verified because his Hamas-employed father said he forgot to take photographs of the alleged abuse marks and discarded all the clothing IDF soldiers supposedly provided Abu Raida when he was freed.

[572] The IDF confirmed that the troops suspected Ahmad of being a militant based on the affiliation of his father (a senior official in Gaza's Tourism Ministry) with Hamas and so detained him during the ground operation.

[607] Within Israel, the newspaper Haaretz issued an editorial stating that the "soft Gaza sand... could turn into quicksand" for the Israeli military and also warned about the "wholesale killing" of Palestinian civilians; the article declared: "There can be no victory here".

Hamas is ISIS”, the article then highlighted some alleged similarities in the groups' influences identified by Dr. Harel Chorev (from the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University).

[642] Catherine Weibel, UNICEF's Communication Chief in Jerusalem said: "Four infants died from complications caused by the bitter cold in Gaza in January... All were from families whose houses were destroyed during the last conflict and were living in extremely dire conditions.