October 7, 2023 · Southern Israel / Gaza Envelope Theater

Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood at 6:29 AM, breaching the Gaza security fence at more than 30 locations simultaneously. Approximately 3,000 militants — on foot, by motorcycle, and by paraglider — poured into Israeli communities. Kibbutz Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, and a dozen other communities were overrun. The Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re'im was attacked; over 360 festivalgoers were massacred. IDF response units took hours to reach the area. By nightfall, approximately 1,200 Israelis were dead and 250 had been taken hostage to Gaza.

October 8 – November 2023 · Northeastern Gaza Theater

Beit Hanoun, in the northeastern corner of Gaza, was one of the first urban centers penetrated during Israel's ground operation. IDF forces pushed through the town using armored engineering units to breach Hamas fortifications and clear buildings. Hamas fighters contested every block, using rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices, and anti-tank missiles from prepared positions. D9 armored bulldozers were used extensively to clear booby-trapped streets and demolish buildings from which snipers operated. The town was substantially devastated. This battle opened the corridor that allowed IDF forces to begin encircling Gaza City from the north.

October 8, 2023 – September 2024 · Northern Israel / Southern Lebanon Theater

From the day after October 7, Hezbollah began a sustained campaign of rocket, anti-tank missile, and drone attacks on northern Israel — displacing 60,000–80,000 Israelis from border communities. Israel retaliated with targeted strikes on Hezbollah commanders and infrastructure. The exchange gradually escalated through 2024. In July, Israel killed Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in a targeted strike in Beirut. On September 27, 2024, Israel killed Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah — the most powerful figure in Lebanon for 32 years — in a massive airstrike on Hezbollah's Beirut headquarters. In October, Israel launched a ground operation into southern Lebanon.

October 27 – December 2023 · Northern Gaza Theater

After three weeks of heavy air bombardment, the IDF launched its ground invasion on October 27 with two armored divisions entering northern Gaza. The advance was contested through densely built urban terrain and Hamas's vast tunnel network — 'the Metro' — which ran beneath hospitals, mosques, and residential buildings. The IDF fought for Gaza City block by block, uncovering tunnel shafts, weapons caches, and command infrastructure. By December, Israeli forces had largely cleared northern Gaza and Gaza City, though at significant civilian cost.

October 31, 2023 – January 2024 · Northern Gaza Theater

Jabalia, the largest refugee camp in Gaza with 110,000 residents, became one of the most contested battlegrounds of the war. On October 31, an IDF airstrike targeting Hamas commander Ibrahim Biari collapsed several buildings in the camp, killing Biari and an estimated 50–100 others. The resulting images of mass casualties caused international shock. The subsequent ground fight through Jabalia was conducted in some of the most densely built urban terrain on earth. Hamas fighters exploited the camp's labyrinthine alleys and interconnected tunnel network. Israeli forces returned to Jabalia in multiple distinct operations as Hamas re-infiltrated areas declared cleared.

December 2023 – April 2024 · Southern Gaza Theater

Khan Younis — Gaza's second-largest city and Yahya Sinwar's hometown — was the next phase of the IDF campaign after clearing northern Gaza. The battle was fought in heavily built-up residential neighborhoods packed with displaced people from the north. Hamas resistance was fierce and the tunnel network extensive. International pressure over civilian casualties intensified as the death toll climbed past 30,000. The IDF declared the main phase of the Khan Younis battle complete in April 2024 but continued clearing operations.

May 7, 2024 – October 2024 · Southern Gaza / Rafah Theater

Despite intense US and international pressure to hold off, Israel launched its Rafah operation on May 7. Over 1 million displaced Palestinians had sought shelter in Rafah, making it the most densely populated city on earth. The IDF seized the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, cutting off the last major aid entry point. The operation proceeded block by block through the summer. On July 13, a targeted strike killed Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. On October 17, a random IDF infantry patrol encountered and killed Yahya Sinwar in Rafah's ruins.

June 8, 2024 · Central Gaza Theater

On June 8, Israeli forces conducted a daytime rescue operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, simultaneously raiding four separate locations where hostages were being held. The operation rescued four living hostages — Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv — held since October 7. The operation used civilian cover vehicles and achieved tactical surprise. Hamas and local fighters responded with intense fire; the fighting killed an estimated 274–280 Palestinians, making it the deadliest single day of fighting in months. One Israeli officer was killed.

September 2024 – Present · West Bank Theater

As the Gaza campaign ground on, the West Bank experienced its most violent period since the Second Intifada. The IDF launched sustained operations in Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps — centers of armed militant activity — with armored vehicle incursions, demolitions of tunnel networks beneath the camps, and targeted killings of local militant commanders. In 2025, the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall, a large-scale clearing operation in Jenin and Tulkarm that lasted weeks, deploying Merkava tanks in the West Bank for the first time in years. Hundreds of militants were killed; more than 20 IDF soldiers died in the operations.

September 17–18, 2024 · Lebanon Theater

In one of the most audacious covert operations in modern history, Israel detonated explosives hidden inside thousands of pager devices distributed to Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon simultaneously on September 17, 2024. The following day, walkie-talkie radios similarly exploded. The operations killed at least 37 people and wounded nearly 3,000 Hezbollah members — including senior commanders — in a single coordinated instant. Israel had apparently compromised Hezbollah's supply chain, embedding PETN explosive within commercial communications devices before delivery. The operation destroyed Hezbollah's secure communications network and created mass psychological terror within the organization.

January 19 – March 18, 2025 · Gaza Strip Theater

Announced on January 15, 2025 and in force from January 19, the first real ceasefire of the war was structured in three phases. The opening phase traded 33 Israeli hostages — women, civilians, and soldiers held since October 7, 2023 — for roughly 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, and required Israeli forces to pull back from populated areas of the Strip. Aid convoys entered at a scale not seen since the war began, and hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans walked north to find their neighborhoods gone. The releases were staged as public spectacles by both sides. The phase held for two months and expired on March 18 without agreement on the second, which would have required Israel to end the war outright.

March 18, 2025 · Gaza Strip Theater

With phase two negotiations deadlocked, Israel resumed the air campaign on March 18, 2025, in one of the deadliest single days of the entire war. Strikes hit across the Strip without the evacuation windows that had preceded earlier offensives, and the ground operation followed. Aid entry was cut off almost entirely in the weeks that followed — a blockade Israel described as pressure on Hamas to release hostages, and which humanitarian agencies described as collective punishment of a population already living in ruins.

May – August 2025 · Southern and central Gaza Theater

Launched in May 2025, Operation Gideon's Chariots was intended to seize and hold territory rather than raid and withdraw — the pattern of the previous eighteen months, in which the IDF had repeatedly cleared areas of Gaza and then returned to fight in them again. It pushed through Khan Younis and the central Strip, displacing populations that had already been displaced five and six times, and compressed most of Gaza's 2 million people into a shrinking coastal strip. Aid restrictions through this period produced the conditions the IPC would formally classify as famine in August.

August 20 – October 2, 2025 · Gaza City Theater

Israel mobilized 60,000 reservists to take Gaza City outright and issued evacuation orders covering some 1.2 million people — an instruction to move that a starving population in a territory with nowhere left to go could not meaningfully follow. The offensive ran through the six weeks in which the IPC confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate, and it proceeded against near-universal international objection, including from Israel's own security establishment, much of which argued publicly that the war had passed the point of achievable military objectives.

October 10, 2025 · Gaza Strip / Sharm el-Sheikh Theater

A twenty-point framework proposed by the Trump administration in late September 2025 produced the agreement that finally stopped the war. Hamas accepted the core terms on October 3; Israel's cabinet approved on October 9; the ceasefire took effect October 10, 2025. Its first phase required the release of the remaining living hostages and the return of the dead, an Israeli withdrawal to agreed lines, and the entry of aid at scale. Its later phases envisaged a transitional governing structure — a 'Board of Peace' with international backing — an International Stabilization Force deployed between Israeli forces and Palestinian-controlled areas, the disarmament of Hamas, and reconstruction. It was the most detailed political architecture proposed for Gaza in two decades, and it deferred the hardest questions to phases that had not yet been negotiated.

January 15, 2026 · Gaza Strip Theater

After Israel confirmed in January 2026 that Hamas had returned the remains of the last hostage taken on October 7, 2023, the agreement moved to its second phase — governance and security transition. The International Stabilization Force began deploying to separate Israeli forces from Palestinian-controlled areas, with a mandate limited to monitoring the ceasefire, training Palestinian police, and securing aid delivery rather than policing Gazan society itself. The return of the last remains closed the file that had defined Israeli politics for twenty-seven months.

July 30 – 31, 2026 · Gaza Strip Theater

On July 30–31, 2026, the US-led Board of Peace and the International Stabilization Force announced that mediators from Egypt, Qatar, Türkiye, and the United States had finalized a roadmap for the next stage of the ceasefire, under which Hamas would disarm and surrender its weapons in stages. Hamas agreed to the framework. Two conditions immediately qualified it: Israel had not publicly accepted the proposal, and Hamas stated it would implement nothing unless Israeli forces met their own withdrawal obligations. It is also unclear whether the smaller armed factions in Gaza consider themselves bound by an agreement Hamas signed.