Victor Friedlander wrote:
> Gaza is not a sovereign state but only a
> break-away district of the State of Israel.
^^^^^ CB: Does Israel claim to be sovereign over Gaza ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
Gaza Strip
The Gaza Strip (Arabic: قطاع غزة Qiṭāʿ Ġazza/Qita' Ghazzah, Arabic pronunciation: [qitˤaːʕ ɣazza]) lies on the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The Strip borders Egypt on the southwest and Israel on the south, east and north. It is about 41 kilometers (25 mi) long, and between 6 and 12 kilometers (4–7.5 mi) wide, with a total area of 360 square kilometers (139 sq mi). The territory takes its name from Gaza, its main city.
The territory has a population of about 1.5 million people, as of July 2009,[1] 1 million of whom were, as of March 2005, refugees[2] who fled to the territory as part of the 1948 Palestinian exodus following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, from those parts of Mandate Palestine that became Israel, and their descendants. The population is predominantly Sunni Muslims and speaks a Western Egyptian dialect of Arabic.
The Gaza Strip acquired its current boundaries at the cessation of fighting in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which was confirmed in the Israel-Egypt Armistice Agreement on 24 February 1949.[3] Article V of the Agreement declared that the demarcation line was not to be an international border. The Gaza Strip continued to be occupied by Egypt. At first it administered the territory through the All-Palestine Government and then directly from 1959 until 1967, when Israel occupied it following the Six-Day War. Pursuant to the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1993, the Palestinian Authority was set up as an interim administrative body to govern Palestinian population centres, with Israel maintaining control of Gaza Strip's airspace, some of its land borders and territorial waters, until a final agreement could be reached. As agreement remained elusive, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza in 2005, saying it was no longer the occupying power there. The UN, Human Rights Watch and many other international bodies and NGOs still consider Israel to be the occupying power of the Gaza Strip,[4][5][6] which Israel disputes.[6]
The Gaza Strip is one of the territorial units forming the Palestinian territories.[7][8][9][10] Actual control of the area within the Gaza Strip borders is in the hands of Hamas, an organization that won civil parliamentary Palestinian Authority elections in 2006 and took over de facto government in the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority by way of its own political maneuvering and armed militia in July 2007, while consolidating power by violently removing the Palestinian Authority's security forces and civil servants