February 19, 2024
With most of the Gaza Strip’s
Palestinians now trapped inside the enclave’s southern tip, the Israeli
onslaught they had attempted to escape has followed them to Rafah. Some 1.4
million people are pinned against a virtually impermeable Egyptian border, while
the entry of life-sustaining aid is chronically stalled. At Kerem Shalom, the
southeastern crossing directly controlled by Israel, Jewish Israelis have been
filmed gleefully blocking food convoys from Egypt, in a fitting correlative to
the genocidal rhetoric of their leaders.
Where, then, are the Palestinians of
Gaza, hungry and homeless, to go?
The question hangs over every
massacre in Rafah, where Israel’s attacks have kept pace with those of the past
four months. Last week, more than 100 Palestinians perished in a single night
of intense strikes that the Israeli military, scrambling to free two hostages,
dubbed “diversionary.” The attacks may be a sign of worse to come: the UN’s
humanitarian affairs chief, Martin Griffiths, warned of “a slaughter” if Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proceeds with a promised ground assault on Rafah.
Rather than press for a ceasefire,
though, the White House has issued toothless calls for Israel to protect Gaza’s
civilians, as if the same military that has killed more than 12,000 Palestinian
children has any interest in sparing the innocent. Knowing this, some
Palestinians have tried to return to the north, but looming famine among the
displaced means any safety, however elusive, will soon give way to hunger.
UNRWA, the UN agency leading food distribution in Gaza, says the last of its
aid convoys to reach the north arrived more than three weeks ago, on Jan. 23.
With food scarce and safe shelter a
gamble, hundreds of families in Gaza have been raising money online to cover
the “coordination services” of Egyptian middlemen, who charge thousands of
dollars to secure passage through the Rafah Crossing. Demand for these exits
far exceeds the Egyptian government’s willingness to accommodate them, though,
and Palestinians fear that they may soon have no choice but to amass at the
border, pleading for refuge in the Sinai desert.
This scenario may be prompting
Egypt’s government to prepare for a mass exodus through Rafah, according to a
report last week by the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights. The report cites
unnamed sources involved in the construction of a “security zone” in eastern
Sinai, where seven-meter walls are being erected “with the aim of receiving
refugees from Gaza.” Egyptian officials told Ahram Online that the area is a
“logistics hub” for aid to be delivered “through the Rafah Border Crossing,”
though it was unclear how such a hub would help overcome Israel’s hindering of
shipments.
The Sinai Foundation backed up its
claims with photos of the construction site, where it says activity began on
Feb. 12 — the day Israel launched its fiercest assault so far on Rafah. The
Associated Press similarly confirmed these activities through satellite images
of the area. Muhannad Sabry, an Egyptian journalist and Sinai expert, told the
Sinai Foundation that preparations for the anticipated displacement were taking
place “in coordination with Israel and the United States.”
If Israel’s perceived sense of
security somehow hinges on emptying Gaza of its people, Netanyahu and his
American backers have resisted saying so publicly. Members of Netanyahu’s
cabinet, however, have had no such inhibitions.
Indeed, the Israelis have long
telegraphed their hopes for a second Palestinian Nakba. As early as October,
+972 reported on former Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon’s call for
establishing “tent cities” in the Sinai, where he saw “a huge expanse, almost
endless space.” And just four days into Israel’s assault, U.S. Secretary of
State Antony Blinken, when asked about securing “safe passage out of Gaza” for
Palestinian civilians, told reporters that the White House was “talking to
Egypt about that.”
Although Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi had repeatedly dismissed the possibility, Cairo-based news
outlet Mada Masr — in an October report that it later retracted — cited
officials with knowledge of “economic incentives” tied to Egypt’s “acceptance
of large inflows of displaced Palestinians.”
The Mada Masr report is no longer
available online, but it tracks with more recent statements by Israeli and
American officials, who have insisted on redirecting UNRWA funds “to address
[the] potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.” That
language appeared in an Oct. 20 White House memo that requested supplemental
funding to help Israel “reestablish territorial security.”
UNRWA on its knees
Meanwhile, the two governments have
been in lockstep over plans to debilitate UNRWA by suspending funds over
allegations that a handful of its employees were involved in the October 7
attack; multiple European states have followed suit, despite a lack of serious
evidence and the disproportionate nature of the response.
Without the agency — whose areas of
operation, in addition to the occupied territories, span Jordan, Lebanon, and
Syria — Palestinians in Gaza stand little chance of surviving the current
onslaught, much less rebuilding the enclave after it ends.
For four months, Israel has
systematically targeted and destroyed not only the institutions of Hamas
governance in Gaza, but also much of UNRWA’s presence there. While UNRWA
schools and refugee camps were subject to repeated Israeli strikes in 2014’s
Operation Protective Edge, the latest assault has taken direct aim at the UNRWA
headquarters and denied the agency access to all its facilities north of Wadi
Gaza, which divides the enclave roughly in half.
Current and former UNRWA officials
who spoke with +972 said there are no precedents for the present situation. Lex
Takkenberg, who spent three decades working with UNRWA, most recently as its
chief ethics officer, recalled the destruction in the northern West Bank city
of Jenin during Israel’s invasion in 2002. That operation — part of what was
then the largest Israeli military build-up in the West Bank since the 1967 War
— killed scores of Palestinians and leveled much of the UNRWA-administered
refugee camp bordering the city.
“It took us more than a year just to
remove the unexploded ordinance and rubble,” said Takkenberg, who was briefly
responsible for the UNRWA reconstruction effort in Jenin. He estimates that the
destroyed area, which he called “ground zero,” was roughly the size of “five to
ten football fields.”
By comparison, the destruction in
Gaza, with a population roughly 100 times that of the Jenin refugee camp, is
apocalyptic. The 25-mile-long Strip has already lost roughly 60 percent of its
housing units, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA.
But Israel’s “true genocidal
intent,” Takkenberg continued, comes through in its deliberate destruction of
essential infrastructure like schools and health centers. OCHA says that about
two-thirds of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning and 140 schools have
been damaged or destroyed — with the rest either abandoned or used as shelters
by hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. UNRWA estimates that more
than a million Gazans have sought refuge at its facilities across the strip.
Now faced with a funding freeze by
its top donor, the United States, along with 15 other countries, the agency is
considering a range of “financial management tactics” to help it sustain its
work beyond February. That, according to UNRWA officials, is when its funding
reserves are likely to run out, leaving it unable to pay salaries or, indeed,
manage the distribution of food and other vital aid in Gaza.
Palestinians receive food aid at a
United Nations distribution center (UNRWA) in the Rafah refugee camp in the
southern Gaza Strip,
“We are doing everything we can to
try and convince these donors to reconsider their decision, to encourage other
[current] donors to increase their funding, and to bring in new donors,”
Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s worldwide director of communications, told +972. When I
asked her if the agency was considering scaling back its work in other places
to help sustain its emergency relief in Gaza, she acknowledged it was “a fair
question” and that “all options are on the table,” but remained hopeful the
agency would secure enough funding to continue uninterrupted.
Even if donors can help make up some
of the shortfall in UNRWA funding, it’s unclear how the agency can overcome the
multiple bureaucratic hurdles being erected by the Israeli government. The
state has refused to clear the right-wing protestors blocking aid through Kerem
Shalom, and Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has instructed
contractors at the Ashdod port not to deliver much-needed flour shipments to
UNRWA. On Feb. 15, the Knesset followed with a bill to bar the agency from
operating on Israel’s “sovereign territory.”
Making displacement permanent
With Netanyahu rejecting any
Palestinian sovereignty over Gaza and no viable plans to assemble an
international caretaker authority, Israel seems intent on assuming “security
responsibility” over the Strip. Standing in its way are Hamas’ ongoing resistance
and the presence of some 2.2 million civilians, 70 percent of whom fall under
the care of UNRWA.
Pushing as many Palestinians as
possible out of Gaza has long been a fantasy of Israeli politicians. Now, with
roughly half of the Strip’s population backed against the Egyptian border and
much of the remaining half threatened with starvation, Israel appears closer
than ever to making good on that fantasy.
Forced displacement, however, is
only one of Israel’s aims; making it permanent is the other. Established in
1949, UNRWA — which was initially “an instrument of explicit U.S. policy,”
Takkenberg reminded me — has sustained five generations of Palestinian
refugees, including in emergencies, according to the agency’s Registration and
Eligibility Division. Since any Palestinians pushed into the Sinai would no
longer reside within UNRWA’s area of operations, their right to return, Israel
and its backers insist, would also become moot.
This argument is not true, according
to Francesca Albanese, who, with Takkenberg, co-authored a 2020 book on
Palestinian refugee rights and currently serves as the UN’s Special Rapporteur
on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Writing for the Institute for
Palestine Studies in 2018, just as the Trump administration had defunded UNRWA,
Albanese pointed out that, even if Palestinian refugees were to fall under the
purview of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees — as all non-Palestine
refugees do — “the relevance of international norms and UN resolutions, such as
Resolution 194, for Palestine refugees, would remain unchanged.” That
resolution, passed in December 1948, affirms that Palestinian refugees who want
to return to their lands “should be permitted to do so at the earliest
practicable date.”
“Forcing UNRWA to cease operations
or forcing Palestinian refugees into Egypt will not abolish the inalienable
rights of the refugees to return, restitution, and compensation,” Takkenberg
said. “Those rights flow from the illegality of the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine, and they only become stronger with the passage of time and the
further development of international law.”
Meanwhile, as the so-called
rules-based international order continues to fail Palestinians, crowdfunding
sites like GoFundMe display page upon page of desperate pleas that speak to a
different, more urgent truth: with nowhere left to run, the people of Gaza have
had enough of Israel’s war and its bloody dividends. Above all, they want to
live.
“We have endured so much hardship
and uncertainty,” one woman, a 21-year-old dentistry student in Gaza, shares
through the site. “We are desperately seeking a way to reach safety and provide
a better life for our children.” Any donations, she adds, will cover “the fees
required to cross the border into Egypt.”
Palestinians in Gaza
Do Have Somewhere to Go
Many professing solidarity with
Palestinians — including alleged legal experts — being slaughtered in Gaza have
said they have “nowhere to go”.
It’s not true.
They do.
Somewhere they actually should go.
Their homes in what is now Israel.
The majority of families of
Palestinians in Gaza were forced there by Israel in 1948.
See great thread by Hanine Hassan:
“Who told you that the 1.5 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in Rafah
have nowhere left to go? My family, now in Rafah, has a home in Jaffa, from
which we were expelled by a fascist German family. The majority of our people
in Gaza have homes to go to, all over Palestine.”
As Prof. John Quigley has noted:
“They are entitled to repatriation under international law, including the
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination which Israel has signed and ratified.” See his writing on this
subject here and here.
And of course there’s UN Resolution
194 of Dec. 11, 1948 which “Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to
their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do
so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for
the property of those choosing not to return…”
The extremely pro-Israel Harry
Truman would state the following year that if “Israel continues to reject the
basic principles set forth” in that UN resolution, the US government “will
regretfully be forced to the conclusion that a revision of its attitude toward
Israel has become unavoidable.” (See below re JFK.)
UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte
would report on September 18, 1948: “It would be an offence against the
principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were
denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into
Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of
the Arab refugees, who have been rooted in the land for centuries.” Actually,
Bernadotte wouldn’t report that, because the Stern Gang shot him six times the
day before his report was issued. They shot his French assistant no less than
17 times. No one was ever brought to justice for killing the mediator.
The prospect of Palestinians going
back to their homes continues to bring out the most murderous impulses in
Israeli officials. AntiWar.com reports: “Israeli Minister of National Security
Itamar Ben Gvir said on Sunday that Israeli forces should shoot Palestinian
women and children in Gaza if they get too close to the Israeli border. … ‘We
cannot have women and children getting close to the border… anyone who gets
near must get a bullet [in his head],’ Ben-Gvir said during an argument with
Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi about the IDF’s
open fire policies, according to The Jerusalem Post.
“After his comments leaked to the
press, Ben Gvir doubled down. In a post on X, the Israeli minister said he
‘does not stutter and does not intend to apologize. All those who endanger our
citizens by getting near the border must be shot. This is what they do in any
normal state.’”
Indeed, in 2018 the “Great March of
Return” began, as Palestinians in Gaza tried to simply walk back to their
homes. On Aug. 31, 2023, The Palestine Chronicle reported: “Gaza to Resume
Great March of Return Protests.” Maureen Clare Murphy at the Electronic
Intifada noted in September:
Protests along the Gaza-Israel boundary resumed in August. Massive
demonstrations dubbed the Great March of Return were held on a regular basis
for nearly two years beginning in early 2018.
The protests were aimed at ending the Israeli siege on Gaza and allowing
Palestinian refugees to exercise their right of return as enshrined in
international law. Some two-thirds of Gaza’s population of more than two
million people are refugees from lands just beyond the boundary fence.
More than 215 Palestinian civilians, including more than 40 children, were
killed during those demonstrations, and thousands more wounded by live fire
during those protests between March 2018 and December 2019.
A UN commission of inquiry found that Israel’s use of lethal force against
protesters warrants criminal investigation and prosecution and may amount to
war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Excessive use of force against Great March of Return protests is expected
to be a major focus of the International Criminal Court’s Palestine
investigation, should it move forward.
The recently slain Palestinian
writer Refaat Alareer noted on Oct. 8, 2023: “The very Israeli snipers that
gunned down hundreds of Palestinian marchers in the Great Return March in
2018/19 were neutralised by Palestinian freedom fighters.”
In a recent piece in the New York
Review of Books — “Gaza: Two Rights of Return — Most Palestinians in Gaza are
now displaced at least twice over. They have a right to choose where to return”
— Sari Bashi from Human Rights Watch writes as a Jewish woman married to a
Palestinian man whose family was forced from their homes in 1948 and again
during the current assault: “I’ll be relieved if my in-laws are merely allowed
to return to northern Gaza and receive support to rebuild a house there.”
Israel is great at that. Committing
so many crimes such that some people are relieved that the most recent may be
alleviated. In fact, such a posture may well facilitate a festering of chronic
injustices — and an incentive for Israel to continue its criminality.
See also this piece which contains
my own family’s story of the Nakba, which I also talked about, along with
journalism, geopolitics, lab origins of Covid and Ebola and other issues, in myrecent interview with Kim Iversen.
No comments:
Post a Comment