What happened
Protective Edge began after the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas-affiliated militants in the West Bank, followed by the revenge killing of a Palestinian teenager by Israeli extremists, and escalated into the longest and deadliest Gaza war prior to 2023. Israel says intensified rocket fire and the discovery of cross-border tunnels, including some reaching close to Israeli communities, necessitated the ground invasion that followed the initial air campaign.
The UN Board of Inquiry — a body the UN itself convened, separate from and more institutionally cautious than the Human Rights Council fact-finding missions used for earlier wars — examined ten incidents involving UN premises and found Israeli explanations did not hold up for at least several of them, including the Beit Hanoun school strike, where UNRWA had specifically communicated the shelter's exact coordinates to Israeli military liaisons in advance, precisely the kind of deconfliction process meant to prevent this outcome. The Board did find that in a small number of separate incidents, militants had used the vicinity of (though not the interior of) UN facilities to fire, complicating any simple narrative that UN premises were struck with no possible justification whatsoever — but for the school strikes specifically examined in detail, the Board's own investigators found no evidence supporting the military necessity Israel initially cited.
The war's casualty asymmetry (roughly 2,251 Palestinian deaths against 73 Israeli deaths, the vast majority of the latter soldiers rather than civilians) reflects both Gaza's population density and the difference between a state with the Iron Dome missile-defence system and a population largely without shelters or equivalent protection — a disparity that recurs across every Gaza war in this file and is a large part of why UN and rights-group scrutiny of Israeli conduct specifically, rather than Hamas's rocket fire alone, has been a consistent feature of the international response to each of these conflicts.