March 30 is the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Great Return March protests in Gaza—called officially to demand Palestinians’ right to return to their ancestral homeland, but really about the continuing suffocation of the Strip’s 2 million population in ways both large and small for the past 12 years. In the most basic terms, the protests are the “what-else-can-we-do” action of a people who know they only get attention when they are being killed and wounded in large enough numbers to make the international news.
“We’re tightening the security ring around the Gaza Strip,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says. “I’ve recently ordered that [military] units be reinforced, that tools be added, in preparation for an extensive campaign.”