On the universality of Gazan resistance: A century-long struggle for human rights

The struggle of Gaza’s people is frequently interpreted through the competing languages of security, nationalism, religion and geopolitics. Each illuminates part of the conflict, yet each can obscure its most fundamental question: are Palestinians entitled to the rights every human being possesses simply by being human? Viewed through the history of human rights, Gazan resistance acquires a significance extending beyond one people or territory. It exposes the distance between humanity’s proclaimed commitment to universal dignity and its willingness to protect those whose rights are repeatedly denied.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, rejects hierarchies of human worth. Rights belong to people regardless of nationality, religion, political allegiance or recognition by a sovereign state. Palestinians therefore need no special justification for claiming life, liberty, education, property and security. Their entitlement precedes the political arrangements through which these rights should be protected.

Gazan resistance, understood as the broader struggle against dispossession and for individual and collective freedom, makes this principle concrete. It encompasses political mobilisation, civic action, cultural continuity and the work of sustaining society under destructive conditions. Its universal significance arises from the rights being defended and the insistence that Palestinians must be able to exercise them.

A Century of Dispossession and Resistance

Beginning this history on 7 October 2023 reduces an extended struggle over rights to the aftermath of one event. It obscures the experiences shaping successive Palestinian generations: dispossession, displacement, occupation and the frustration of political freedom.

The century-long dimension emerges from the imperial arrangements preceding Israel’s establishment. The 1917 Balfour Declaration supported a Jewish national home in Palestine while describing the existing non-Jewish population through safeguards for civil and religious rights. Incorporated into the British Mandate, this formulation recognised one population’s national aspirations without equivalent recognition of the other’s.

The violence surrounding Israel’s establishment transformed political exclusion into mass dispossession. The April 1948 attack on Deir Yassin by Irgun and Lehi became an enduring expression of Palestinian civilian vulnerability.

During the Nakba, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted. Gaza became a major refuge for people separated from their homes, livelihoods and communities.

The coincidence of the Nakba and the Universal Declaration in 1948 reveals a profound historical dissonance. As the international community articulated universal dignity, Palestinians lost essential conditions for exercising their rights. Their subsequent struggle has continually exposed the gap between recognition and protection.

Israel’s occupation of Gaza in 1967 added further layers of control. Its withdrawal of settlements and permanent ground forces in 2005 did not establish Palestinian sovereignty. The International Committee of the Red Cross continued to regard Gaza as occupied because Israel retained effective control over key dimensions of access and movement. The Israeli blockade imposed in 2007 further constrained economic and social life.

Recurring violence intensified these conditions. The United Nations recorded 2,251 Palestinian deaths during the 2014 hostilities, including 1,462 civilians. A UN commission investigating the 2018 Great March of Return found that Israeli forces killed 183 demonstrators with live ammunition. Gaza’s insecurity thus long preceded October 2023.

The three generations of human rights illuminate this experience. Civil and political rights protect against violence and arbitrary power; socioeconomic rights sustain dignified life; collective rights concern a people’s future. In Gaza, their interdependence is unavoidable.

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First-Generation Rights: Life, Liberty and Security

The right to life is fundamental. By October 2026, Gaza’s health authorities reported over 74,000 Palestinian deaths since October 2023, according to Reuters.

Genocide directly concerns this right.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

It identified four genocidal acts, including killing, serious bodily or mental harm, destructive living conditions and measures intended to prevent births, alongside genocidal intent. Separately, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered binding provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention and enable urgently needed humanitarian assistance. 

Liberty and security also require protection against arbitrary detention and torture. A July 2024 UN report documented detention without charge or trial and accounts of ill-treatment. Freedom of association likewise matters: UN experts condemned Israel’s 2021 designation of six Palestinian civil society organisations as terrorist organisations. These findings connect physical survival with safeguards against arbitrary power and the defence of dignity.

Property Rights: The Foundations of Freedom

Property connects individual protection to the history of dispossession. Article 17 of the Universal Declaration recognises ownership and prohibits arbitrary deprivation of property. A Palestinian home or agricultural plot also sustains family continuity, independence and attachment to place.

OCHA’s September 2025 humanitarian snapshot reported that 92 per cent of Gaza’s housing units were destroyed or damaged. Such devastation simultaneously removes shelter, accumulated savings and the physical foundations of community life. Rebuilding therefore concerns the restoration of social continuity as well as material assets.

Settlement policies elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territory reveal a related connection between property and political exclusion. In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence unlawful and identified obligations concerning settlement cessation, evacuation and reparation. Its findings connected Israeli policies to the denial of Palestinian self-determination.

Property links individual rights to collective freedom: people cannot meaningfully control their future while repeatedly losing the material foundations of their existence.

Second-Generation Rights: Education, Health and Livelihoods

Economic and social rights deepen this understanding. People may survive bombardment while losing everything needed for a viable future. Education, healthcare, food and employment give dignity practical substance. Their destruction produces injuries that outlast immediate violence.

In August 2025, famine was formally confirmed in Gaza Governorate. The joint announcement by UN agencies linked starvation to conflict, repeated displacement, severe restrictions on humanitarian access and the collapse of essential systems. Hunger thus exposes how the destruction of social infrastructure can threaten life as directly as armed violence.

Healthcare illustrates the same interdependence. In September 2026, OCHA documented shortages of cancer medicines, dialysis supplies and insulin, linking disruption to underfunding and obstacles to the entry of available medicines. Interrupted treatment can cause irreversible harm even after supplies resume.

Education reveals the consequences across generations. A November 2025 assessment presented by UNESCO found that 95 per cent of Gaza’s higher education campuses were damaged or destroyed, with 22 of 38 completely destroyed. OCHA reported approximately 200,000 children without structured learning in September 2026. These losses threaten the knowledge and professional capacity essential to future recovery.

Yet the defence of education continues.

UNESCO reported providing temporary learning spaces for 10,000 university students. Such efforts embody resistance through the preservation of learning: students and educators sustain capacities on which rebuilding their society depends.

Livelihoods connect these examples. UNRWA has documented how restrictions on fishing constrain families’ incomes. Under blockade, access to the sea becomes a question of economic survival. Restoring rights therefore requires opportunities to work and produce alongside emergency assistance.

Humanitarian relief is indispensable, but a durable response must restore the ability to sustain an independent life. Otherwise, assistance risks becoming the permanent means of supporting people whose freedom remains unresolved.

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Third-Generation Rights: Self-Determination and Cultural Continuity

Self-determination brings these dimensions together. Frequently discussed alongside collective or third-generation rights, it is expressly recognised in the common first article of the two principal international human-rights covenants. It encompasses peoples’ ability to determine their political status, pursue development and control their natural wealth and resources.

For Palestinians, this reaches into daily life. Who determines access to land and water? Who decides whether people can move, rebuild or establish economic connections? Self-determination concerns the capacity to influence these conditions instead of remaining permanently subject to decisions made elsewhere.

Restrictions on fishing demonstrate how collective and socioeconomic rights overlap. Access to natural resources supports livelihoods, food security and development. Control over those resources therefore affects both individual welfare and a people’s capacity to shape its future.

Cultural continuity belongs within the same struggle. By 24 March 2026, UNESCO had verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza, including religious buildings, monuments, museums and archaeological sites. These losses affect the places through which communities locate themselves in history and transmit belonging. They diminish Palestinian collective life and humanity’s shared inheritance.

Maintaining family records, preserving cultural knowledge and documenting violations consequently carry political significance. These practices defend claims that displacement and impunity might erase. They assert that Palestinians possess a history and the authority to help determine their future.

Gaza and the Universal History of Emancipation

The significance of this assertion becomes clearer within the broader history of emancipation. The American struggle for independence advanced government by consent. The French Revolution gave enduring force to liberty and equality. South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement challenged institutionalised racial inequality. Their importance lies partly in how particular struggles expanded the reach of principles presented as universal.

These histories also expose a persistent tension. Movements and states can proclaim universal rights while excluding people from their enjoyment. Progress depends on those excluded demanding that the principles apply to them. Universality gains practical meaning through resistance to the claim that some people must indefinitely await protection.

Gazan resistance belongs within this history through its assertion of rights whose validity extends to everyone. National character and universal significance are compatible: Palestinians seek to exercise freedoms that cannot coherently be reserved for others. Their struggle demands that human rights apply even when protection challenges powerful interests.

This places responsibility on institutions and governments invoking universal principles. Recognising Palestinian suffering must translate into protection, accountability and the restoration of conditions necessary for freedom. Palestinian voices and choices must inform reconstruction and political arrangements; treating people solely as aid recipients overlooks their agency.

If protection depends on geopolitical importance or diplomatic alliances, rights become privileges distributed through political favour. Defending Palestinian rights therefore also defends the equal application of standards that governments claim to accept as universal.

Gaza therefore tests whether human dignity generates obligations when fulfilling them carries political costs. Sympathy alone cannot resolve that question. Universal rights acquire credibility through consistent protection, especially where power makes their enforcement difficult and inconvenient.

The rights Palestinians defend emerge from their particular history, but their validity does not stop at Palestine’s borders. Life, liberty, a home, education, healthcare and the freedom to shape a collective future belong to the common substance of human dignity.

The universality of Gazan resistance lies in its insistence that Palestinians must be able to exercise the rights humanity has already declared to be universal.

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