Originally published 2021-05-11.
On the evening of 10 May 2021, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets from Gaza towards Jerusalem and southern Israel, and Israel answered with airstrikes across the Gaza Strip. By the next day, Gaza's health ministry said 28 Palestinians had been killed, 10 of them children, and more than 100 wounded. Those first deaths opened an 11-day war that ended with an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire on 21 May, by which time more than 250 Palestinians and 13 people in Israel had died.
This page explains what happened in those first hours, what led up to them, and how the fighting ended, with figures dated so that early counts are not confused with final totals.
The first day of strikes
Hamas had set Israel a 6 pm deadline to withdraw police from the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Minutes after it passed, rockets were launched, setting off sirens as far as Jerusalem. Israel said its strikes targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, rocket launchers and tunnels. Early reports from Israel described minor injuries from the rockets, including a civilian hurt when an anti-tank missile hit a vehicle near the border.
In Gaza, the dead that first night included children. In Beit Hanoun, in the north of the strip, children were playing in the street before the evening iftar meal, which breaks the Ramadan fast, when two explosions hit. Al Jazeera reported that most of them came from one extended family; two brothers, Ibrahim, 11, and Marwan, 7, were the only children of their father. At dawn, a strike on a house in the Al-Shati refugee camp killed at least three civilians, among them a woman and a man with a disability.
Who caused every death that night was disputed. Over the course of the conflict, some Palestinians were killed by rockets that fell short inside Gaza, and Israel's military suggested this applied to some early casualties. Independent counts later attributed at least seven Palestinian deaths in the war to misfired rockets.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas had crossed a "red line" and warned: "Whoever attacks us will pay a heavy price."
What led to the escalation
The war grew out of weeks of tension in Jerusalem during Ramadan.
Sheikh Jarrah. Several Palestinian families in this East Jerusalem neighbourhood faced eviction in favour of Jewish settler organisations, which claimed the land under Israeli law based on pre-1948 ownership. Lower courts had ordered the evictions; Israel's Supreme Court was due to rule on an appeal but postponed its decision on 9 May after the attorney general intervened. Protests and sit-ins there were met with arrests.
Al-Aqsa. Israeli police entered the Al-Aqsa compound, Islam's third holiest site and also Judaism's holiest as the Temple Mount, on several occasions. On 7 May, and again on the morning of 10 May, officers fired stun grenades, tear gas and rubber-coated bullets, while some Palestinians threw stones. The Palestinian Red Crescent said more than 300 Palestinians were hurt on 10 May, 228 of whom went to hospitals or clinics. Israeli police said 21 officers were injured, three of them seriously enough to be hospitalised.
Jerusalem Day. The same day, Israeli nationalists held their annual flag march marking Israel's capture of East Jerusalem in 1967. Critics call the march provocative because some participants have chanted racist slogans in past years. Authorities changed its route away from the Muslim Quarter of the Old City to avoid confrontation, and it broke up when the rocket sirens sounded.
Shocking footage out of Israel - children and their mothers scramble for shelter as rocket sirens go off.
— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) May 10, 2021
In the last hour alone, more than a dozen rockets have been fired from Gaza, including at Jerusalem. pic.twitter.com/IBMjVvHO0t
How the 11-day war unfolded
Over the following days the conflict grew far beyond the first strikes. Palestinian armed groups fired about 4,360 rockets and mortar shells, an average of roughly 400 a day. Israel's Iron Dome system intercepted around 95% of those heading towards populated areas, but rockets still killed and wounded people in Israeli towns.
Israel carried out hundreds of strikes on Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth. The deadliest single incident was a strike on Al-Wehda Street in Gaza City on 16 May that killed 44 civilians. High-rise buildings were brought down, including one housing international media offices, and more than 72,000 Palestinians were displaced.
Inside Israel, clashes between Jewish and Arab citizens broke out in mixed cities such as Lod, where a state of emergency was declared on 11 May. The violence also spread to the occupied West Bank.
The final toll
When the ceasefire took effect in the early hours of 21 May, the human cost was far higher than the first-day figures:
- Gaza: at least 256 Palestinians killed, including 66 children, according to the UN; Gaza's health ministry reported about 1,950 wounded. Israel said around 200 of the dead were militants, while Hamas acknowledged about 80 of its fighters.
- Israel: at least 13 people killed, including two children, an Indian caregiver and two Thai workers.
Because casualty figures change daily during a war, numbers from different days or sources should always be compared with care.
The wider context
Hamas, an Islamist movement, has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the United States, the European Union and others list it as a terrorist organisation. The rival Fatah party dominates the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank. Gaza has been under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since Hamas took control.
The status of East Jerusalem is at the heart of the dispute. Israel annexed it after 1967 and treats the whole city as its capital, while most of the world regards East Jerusalem as occupied territory. The UN and most governments consider Israeli settlements in occupied land illegal under international law, a view Israel rejects. Some settlers base their claim on religious belief that the land was promised to the Jewish people, while others cite security or property claims.
Analysts have long argued that the absence of a political process, the expansion of settlements and the blockade feed support for armed groups, while Israel points to rocket fire and attacks as the reason for its security measures. Both sides' civilians bore the cost in May 2021, and the underlying issues behind that war remained unresolved.
Sources: Al Jazeera: Palestinians killed in Israeli air raids on Gaza (10–11 May 2021); Wikipedia: 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis. Original story via Daily Wire. Video posted on X by StopAntisemitism.org.
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