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The Gaza Strip lies on the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It 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). This piece of land is home to about 1.5 million Palestinians. Many of these people lived in other parts of Palestine prior to the 1947 - 49 Israeli War of Independence, when they had to flee. These Palestinians have not been allowed to return to their former villages. The area is recognized internationally as part of the Palestinian territories. Actual control of the area within the Gaza Strip borders are 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 manoeuvring and armed militia in July 2007, while consolidating power by violently removing the Palestinian Authority's security forces and civil servants from the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip, having previously been a part of the Ottoman Empire and then the British Mandate of Palestine, was occupied by Egypt from 1948–67, and then by Israel following the 1967 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 populated Palestinian centres - with Israel maintaining military control of the Gaza Strip's airspace, some of its land borders and its 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 consider Israel to be the occupying power of the Gaza Strip. Israel disputes this.

The territory takes its name from Gaza, its main city. The population speak a Western Egyptian dialect of Arabic and are estimated by some sources at as high as 1.5 million (July 2009). Refugees of the 1948 Palestinian exodus and their descendants made up 85% of the population as of March 2003.

In a letter that Ahmed Jabari sent to Khaled Meshal he warned him that security situation Gaza is getting worse as it was reported by Arabic-language newspaper A-Sharq Al-Awsat. Jabari wrote that Gaza is falling into anarchy