Gaza

Gaza’s history spans millennia of strategic importance and cultural transformation. Throughout antiquity, the region passed through the hands of Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Muslims, and Ottomans[1], with influences ranging from local Arabic tribes, Grecian migration and trade, Israelite incursion, and Phoenician settlement[1].

Gaza achieved its greatest stability under Egyptian control in the second millennium BC, with evidence of Egyptian dwellings, funerary practices, and taxation and worship[1]. The Philistines experienced a period of relative peace from the 12th to 7th centuries, with only Israel as a serious competitor[1]. Later, Sargon of Assyria deported native Philistines and replaced them with Phoenicians, while the harbor of Ruqeish appears to have been built by Sargon as a rare and valuable asset[1]. Alexander the Great won the area for the Greeks through a famous siege in the fourth century[1], and the Hasmonean Dynasty under Alexander Jannaeus kept the city from Nabatean control, constituting the only period until 1948 when Gaza fell to a Jewish state[1].

In the Christian era, Philip baptized an Ethiopian eunuch en route to Gaza in the first century CE[2], and in the fifth century, Bishop Porphyrius converted pagan Gaza to Christianity, destroying pagan temples and establishing a Christian center of learning and monasticism with a famous Rhetorical School and Jewish minority[2]. From the seventh to fifteenth centuries, much of Gaza converted to Islam, with churches transformed into mosques[2].

Modern Gaza emerged from twentieth-century upheaval. Following Israel’s establishment in 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba, approximately 200,000 of the 750,000 displaced Palestinians sought refuge in Gaza[3]. When armistice lines were drawn at the end of the 1948–49 war, the Gaza Strip was created as a separate entity under Egyptian administration until 1967[3]. Israel’s current control resulted from the 1967 War, though the Sinai was returned to Egypt through the Camp David Accords, while Gaza remained under Israeli occupation[3].

Today, Gaza is a 25-mile-long strip where 2.3 million Palestinians live, with three-quarters being refugees or descendants of those displaced in 1948, making it one of the most densely populated spaces on earth[3].

[1] Clifford T. Winters, “Gaza,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016). [See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.]
[2] Bruce N. Fisk, “Appendix: A Gaza Timeline,” in Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza (New York, NY: Cascade Books, 2025), 350–351.
[3] Rebekah Choate, Krista Johnson Weicksel, and Peter Makari, Rooted in Faith and Justice: Christian Calls to Conscience & Cries for Peace in Palestine (Ashland, OH: Chalice Press, 2025). [See here, here, here, here.]