The Gaza Strip is experiencing “indiscriminate violence of exceptional intensity”, estimates the National Court of Asylum (CNDA). This is why she granted refugee status to a Gazan who fled the Palestinian enclave in 2022 to escape Hamas “persecution”. According to a document published Tuesday, the Court grants this status but does not mention the motivations which led it to make this decision.
The young Gazan explained at the hearing that he was forced in the spring of 2022 to leave Khan Younes in the south of the Gaza Strip with his brother, his father and his cousin following an altercation with members of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, fearing reprisals.
From Gaza to Guyana
“We were in the house when we heard my father shouting ‘help!’ and then being beaten by men with camouflaged faces. We then got into a fight with them,” he said. While a minor, he first fled to Egypt. During his journey he had learned that their attackers wanted to “bury missiles on the grounds of their house to install a launch base” which “would have destroyed their entire village”.
His father, a police officer for the Fatah movement from 2000 to 2007, was “unfavorably known to Hamas”, the rapporteur of the session pointed out at the hearing. Then joining Libya, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and finally Guyana, the young man saw his asylum request rejected in January 2023 by Ofpra, the agency responsible for granting refugee status.
Case law of February 12
On February 12, for the first time since the war between Israel and Hamas on October 7, the CNDA granted subsidiary protection, provided for by European law, to another Palestinian on the grounds that the region was experiencing “a situation of indiscriminate violence of exceptional intensity.
This type of decision by the CNDA, which rules on appeal on asylum requests, generally sets a precedent for all similar cases in France.
The Court distinguishes the needs for protection according to whether or not the indiscriminate violence observed in a given place and time reaches the level known as “exceptional intensity”. If “exceptional intensity” is retained by the Court, there is no need for justification other than proving that one lives in this area, Tania Racho, researcher in European law, explained to AFP.