What happened
The blockade's stated purpose was preventing Hamas from importing weapons and materiel following its 2007 takeover of Gaza, and Israel maintains it has a legitimate security basis given Hamas's continued rocket fire and, later, the tunnel networks used in the October 7 attack. In practice, the restrictions extended well beyond weapons: for years Israel maintained a published list restricting 'dual-use' civilian items including certain construction materials, and at points, cooking gas, paper, and specific foodstuffs, on the basis they could theoretically be repurposed for military use — restrictions a leaked 2012 Israeli document reportedly showed had been calculated around a minimum-calorie-intake model for Gaza's population, treating food access as a lever rather than solely a security exclusion.
The 2010 Mavi Marmara incident — an Israeli naval raid on a Turkish-flagged aid flotilla attempting to breach the maritime blockade, which killed nine Turkish activists and one Turkish-American — brought the blockade international attention and led Israel to ease some restrictions afterward, though the core blockade structure remained in place through the following decade and tightened again sharply during the 2023-2025 war (documented in this file's entries on the Gaza famine and aid-site killings). The ICRC's 'collective punishment' characterization is a specific legal term under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits punishing a civilian population for acts it did not individually commit — a characterization Israel has consistently rejected, arguing the blockade is a security measure against Hamas rather than punishment of Gaza's population, a distinction humanitarian law experts have generally found difficult to sustain given the blockade's broad civilian impact.