Before the massacre of over a thousand innocent Israelis, people from Gaza could come and go at the Rafah checkpoint with Egypt. This was at the discretion of Egypt and Hamas. Israel did not control Rafah. Before October 7th, life in Gaza was fairly normal. People went to work and school.
People went to the beach. People went out to dinner. The economy in Gaza is not great. Why is that? It's because Hamas stole millions in aid to build tunnels and for rockets to launch at Israel. The Gaza strip was part of Egypt until they lost control over it after the Six Day War in 1967. The people of Gaza elected Hamas to represent them. Big mistake. The "Palestinians" have passed on multiple opportunities to make a peace deal with Israel. They chose to hang on to the fantasy that they could destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. The "Palestinians" will go down in history as the people who fucked around and found out, repeatedly. "Palestinians" is in quotes because there's no such thing as "Palestine". I know a lot of people will disagree with what I have said.
It doesn't matter to me. All the history and facts are available to people if they're interested in what's true. The truth will set you free...lol.
You gotta revised your statement about free flow of people or goods through the Rafah check point as since 2007 it has been sporadically or intermittently open by Egypt which is the reason so many tunnels were dug between Egypt and Gaza . You will bring up the weapon argument and ill bring up the food and medication argument.
As your opinion about the missed opportunities i would say that is one way of seeing things . Others see things differently as both sides threw away opportunities because of political and popular pressure from their respective people.
Denying Palestine as an entity or people is a reflection of the Europeans political play in the region in the early 1900s that the Zionist movement used to rewrite history and push their version of history and their view . But nobody can make disappear the family history of those tribes and people who lived on that land independently of their form of government at the time before the return of the Jewish people from Europe.
At this point Netanyahu and the orthodox far right portion of the electorate in Israel might get their way in Gaza but they won't be look too kindly but the rest of the world for generations to come . I told family and friends after the campaign in Gaza had been underway for one week what the end game was and exactly the plan that Netanyahu applied. After seeing what Russia did to Aleppo it gave the Israeli the path to follow (Inhalation of the city on a grand scale )
Kill ratio in previous battles between them when you include the retaliation was 15 to 1 on average if i recall ...this time they are at 44 to 1 . We will see where it leads but for the majority of people worldwide based on the polls... they don't support Israel as much as they did in the past .
The starvation tactic being used on more than 2 million people is in contravention of the Geneva convention Article 54 .2 and it is why the word genocide is being used to describe what Israel is doing as other nations used that same tactic to annihilate a population.
As for now the thousand year conflict for that sacred piece of land will go on with more unnecessary death the majority of which are children, women and elderly.