Gaza- At the age of 80, Abdul Wahed Ahmed lives what he experienced during the Nakba in 1948. He was a six-year-old child at the time, when he and his family were forcibly displaced from their town of Berbera. They lived with thousands in tents that, over time, turned into refugee camps in Gaza, supervised by an agency. Relief and Works for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
These tents were “temporary,” or so the Nakba generation thought, until they returned to their cities, towns, and villages from which they had been displaced as a result of horrific massacres committed by “Zionist gangs.”
Years passed until these tents formed eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, which is facing a fierce war for the third month in a row, causing the displacement and displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians.
The largest displacement operation
Local and international organizations estimate that those displaced by the Israeli war represent 85% of the 2.3 million Palestinians residing in the Gaza Strip, and more than 70% come from refugee families in the largest forced displacement process since the Nakba.
With sarcasm and oppression, Abdul Wahid told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “We were demanding the right to return to Berbera, and now we are demanding the right to return to Jabalia and Beit Lahia.”
In a small, modest tent that was blown by the wind, Abdel Wahed spends most of his time praying and eating the little food available. He looks around the place that has turned into a camp, and memories crowd into his head. He wonders, “Where do they want to abandon us after Rafah?”
A few dozen tents were set up by displaced people from the northern Gaza Strip in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood adjacent to the border with Egypt. This eighty-year-old refugee fears that the massacres committed by Israel will force them to flee to Sinai.
Many people share this fear in light of the severe overcrowding that the Palestinian city of Rafah – on the border with its Egyptian sister Rafah – is witnessing as a result of large waves of displacement, estimated by local authorities at about 700,000 displaced people, residing in shelter centers and in the homes of relatives and friends.
But thousands like Abdul Wahid and his family had no choice but to set up tents in an empty land in the west of the city, lacking the most basic necessities of life.
Pursuing the displaced
Abdul Wahed still stores many painful memories. He says, “This is how it started,” and points to the adjacent tents with his hands. He continues, “What comes next? Will we live here, or will Israel pursue us with murder and expel us from the country?”
The occupation army pursued displaced people from the city of Khan Yunis and areas north of the Gaza Strip to the city of Rafah, killing people and committing horrific massacres with air strikes targeting residential homes housing displaced families, the last of which was the home of the Abu Dabaa family in the Shaboura refugee camp, causing the death and injury of dozens.
Local authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 45% of the victims of Israeli air strikes in the southern areas of the Gaza Strip, including the city of Rafah, are displaced persons, who abandoned their homes and residential areas in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, and took refuge in the southern areas, which the occupation army claimed were “Safe”.
Amal Abdullah, “Umm Shafiq,” complains of the difficult situation in her tent next to Abdul Wahed’s tent, and she tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “We were displaced from Beit Lahia to Khan Yunis and from there to Rafah, and then where do they want to abandon us?”
“On Sinai,” her son Tawfiq (30 years old) answered while holding his only child, Amal, with his right hand, which he gave birth to after 10 years of marriage, and with his other hand he pointed to the border with Egypt. He told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “Our homes were destroyed in Beit Lahia, and we are no longer able to think about anything, and my only concern now is the safety of my daughter.”
But his mother, who is in her fifties, only wants to return to Beit Lahia and rebuild her destroyed home. She asserts, “If we leave our land, we will not return to it again as it happened in the 1940s.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned, in Qatar last Sunday, of increasing pressure for mass exodus to Egypt.
Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, accused Israel of paving the way to expel the population of the Gaza Strip en masse to Egypt across the border, pointing out in an article published by the American Los Angeles Times newspaper the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the crowding of displaced civilians who fled the Israeli bombing and ground war near the border in North then south.
He stressed that “the developments we are witnessing indicate attempts to transfer the Palestinians to Egypt.”
While Israeli political and military circles have consistently denied any plans to transfer Gazans to Egypt, members of the government have publicly defended the hypothesis that the Palestinians will leave the Strip.
War crime
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote on Facebook, “Welcome to the voluntary migration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world.” Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel also called for encouraging “the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza outside the Strip, for humanitarian reasons.”
Former Israeli officials estimated – in television interviews – that Egypt could establish large tent cities in the Sinai desert, with international funding.
The head of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Observatory, Rami Abdo, told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that, according to the Statute of the International Criminal Court, the deportation of the occupying state or the transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory inside or outside this territory constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts.
In fact, what is happening today in Gaza is not a war in the traditional sense as much as it is a military attack in which Israel commits the crime of forced displacement and genocide without military coercive reasons, according to Abdo.
He believes that what Tel Aviv practiced in pushing the civilian population in Gaza to flee is a path that reflects Israeli intentions to displace people outside the Strip using continuous bombing and a policy of starvation against the largest human mass currently present in Rafah, which may push this mass to search for places where there is security and limitation. The lowest necessities of life.
Political science professor Hossam Al-Dajani believes that Israel is achieving three goals by pushing people to the far south, towards the city of Rafah. The first relates to the ease of implementing the scenario of forced population displacement towards Sinai, especially with the intensification of collective punishment, food insecurity, and genocide crimes.
As for the second goal, Al-Dajani told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, it is to show the occupation as caring for civilians and responsive to international calls within a policy of misleading the world, because there are no safe areas along the Gaza border. While the third goal is to reduce the demographic mass in combat zones to implement a scorched earth policy.
The spokesman is certain that Israel will not succeed in its plans and endeavors, and says that all indicators confirm that there are shifts in the regional and international scene, and in the operational framework inside Gaza, most notably the occupation army’s leaks of the number of its dead, to turn the Israeli inside against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The scale of the ongoing movement within Western countries, the economic boycott, etc., are all reasons and motives that accelerate the end of the war and the defeat of Israel, as Al-Dajani confirms.