About two years ago, Oct 2023, Daniel Boffey, reporter for the Guardian wrote an article to attempt to explain the use of the phrase “From the river to the sea” by Palestinians, Israelis, and observers in the Middle East and beyond.
Hamas, whose gunmen killed 1,400 people on 7 October, claim the slogan in their rejection of Israel.
“Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea,” says the organisation’s 2017 constitution. (Boffey, 2023)
In 2021, the Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer argued that those who saw genocidal ambition in the phrase, or indeed an unambiguous desire for the destruction of Israel, did so due to their own Islamophobia.
It was instead, he argued, merely a way to express a desire for a state in which “Palestinians can live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominated by others nor dominating them”. (Boffey, 2023)
The context and the intent is key.
The founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party trolls: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” (Boffey, 2023)
Amichai Stein writing in the Jerusalem Post reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared there will be no Palestinian state west of the Jordan river even as he was weighing annexation.
One of the sources noted that there was no detailed discussion of what exactly Israel might annex, but rather deliberations over several options - one of which is the annexation of the Jordan Valley. (STEIN, 2025)
Chris McGreal writing for the Guardian in Nov 2023 addresses the question “Is Gaza still occupied?”.
One consequence of the second intifada was Sharon’s decision to “disengage” from the Palestinians beginning in 2005 with the closing of Israeli settlements in Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank. It is not clear how much further Sharon would have gone with this policy as he had a stroke and went into a coma the following year.
The status of Gaza since the disengagement remains disputed. Israel says it is no longer occupied. The United Nations says otherwise because of Israel’s continued control of airspace and territorial waters, and also access into the territory, along with Egypt. Israeli has also blockaded the enclave since Hamas came to power in 2006.
In addition, many Palestinians in Gaza do not see themselves as a separate entity from the rest of their territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and so argue that as a whole they remain occupied. (McGreal, 2023)
Annexation of territory of a people by a nation with whom they are engaged in a military conflict has rarely brought freedom and self determination to a population in an occupied territory.
References
Boffey, D. (2023, October 31). 'From the river to the sea': where does the slogan come from and what does it mean? The Guardian. Retrieved September 28, 2025, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/from-the-river-to-the-sea-where-does-the-slogan-come-from-and-what-does-it-mean-israel-palestine
McGreal, C. (2023, October 13). What are the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict? The Guardian. Retrieved September 28, 2025, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/09/why-israel-palestine-conflict-history
STEIN, A. (2025, September 21). Benjamin Netanyahu: No Palestinian state west of the Jordan. The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved September 28, 2025, from https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-868295
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