Abstract
On the morning of October 7, 2023, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) caught everyone off guard by launching a surprise attack, called Toofan Al-Aqsa operation (Al-Aqsa Flood), from Gaza into the Gaza envelope on the Israeli side. In the first year of the war, approximately 1,200 Israeli and 42,000 Palestinians lost their lives. This chapter views the attack on October 7 as an expected culmination of a series of events that started with the rejection of the results of the Palestinian elections in 2005 by Israel and the US and the intensification of escalatory events in the two years preceding the attack. Furthermore, the chapter argues that three primary elements represent the root causes of the state of escalation over the past couple of decades that led to the outbreak of events on October 7. These underlying causes are the aggressive Israeli colonial project in Palestine, the new American approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which started with Trump and was continued by Biden, and the failure of the peace process to produce a new vision for the resolution of the conflict after the demise of the two-state solution on the ground.