![]() ![]() Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser formed Palestinian guerrilla groups under Egyptian command, but held back from engaging in an all-out war with Israel. ![]() By 1956, some 300 Israelis and between 2,700 and 5,000 Palestinians had been killed in the sporadic fighting. Skirmishes often erupted between Palestinians and Egyptian soldiers on one side, and Israeli soldiers and settlers on the other. Many Palestinians continued to cross the border into Israel, however, to visit their relatives and–in some cases–to carry out raids. By the 1950s, the temporary refugee camps established for them by the UNRWA had turned into vast, semi-permanent shantytowns. ![]() Sacco sets the scene by chronicling how, after the creation of Israel in 1948, 200,000 Palestinian refugees ended up in the Gaza Strip, at the time under Egyptian control. His latest work, Footnotes in Gaza, is based on a trip he made to the Palestinian enclave in 2003 to research a near-forgotten episode in Palestinian history: the massacres of civilians committed by Israeli troops in Rafah and Khan Younis during the tripartite aggression of 1956. ![]() Sacco is famous for his award-winning graphic novel Palestine (Fantagraphics, 1996) and for Safe Area Gorazde (Fantagraphics, 2000), about the Bosnian war. ![]()
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