In 1948, the Palestinians experienced what it meant to be expelled from their own homeland. The people in the Gaza Strip fear that this could happen again. Leaked documents from Israel at least say so.
Thousands of people have fled from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip in recent weeks. With carts and donkeys or with heavy loads themselves, Palestinians shouldered their belongings and followed the Israeli government’s request to leave the north before the announced ground offensive. But not everyone left. Many stayed. What keeps some of them is fear for their homeland.
“The experience we had with our families in 1948 taught us that if you leave you cannot return,” Khader Dibs, who lives in the crowded Shuafat refugee camp on the outskirts of Jerusalem, told the Associated Press (AP). . Dibs refers to an event that is deeply etched in Palestinian memory. It is directly linked to the founding of the state of Israel and continues to shape the fate of the stateless Palestinians to this day.
Stateless in your own homeland
Dibs speaks of the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” of 1948. According to estimates, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from the then-establishing Israeli territory. The Nakba began as early as 1947, when the Jewish population settled in the region and laid claim to the land. The day after Israel was founded in 1948, the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria declared war on the young state – and lost. Israel conquered three-quarters of former British Palestine.
Documents that historians were only able to view from the mid-1980s show how violently the Palestinians were driven out of the area. Villages were systematically destroyed or renamed, and the residents either fled on their own or were driven out. There were massacres and looting. Those who remained in Israel were subject to martial law. Their basic rights have been restricted; The Israeli authorities viewed the Palestinians as a security risk. The people were also dispossessed and their property was placed under the control of the Israeli state. The Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish described them as “strangers in their own land.”
Those who didn’t stay in Israel went to the remaining lands: the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. However, the majority of the displaced Palestinians fled to neighboring Arab states such as Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. But all that awaited the people there was a stateless refugee existence in tent cities, sometimes with security and access restrictions.
In 1948, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was founded. Those who had lost their livelihood as a result of the Arab-Israeli war and had been resident in the Palestinian mandate in the previous two years were registered and provided for by the United Nations. The descendants of the refugees who were registered at the time are still eligible today.
Refugees are also not safe at the aid organization
Today, UNRWA counts nearly six million displaced people across the region. According to the UN, almost 700,000 internally displaced people are currently staying in the 149 facilities in the Gaza Strip. But the conditions are precarious: the camps are overcrowded, and in addition to the psychological stress on the people, the health risks are also increasing. “Several cases of acute respiratory infections, diarrhea and chickenpox have already been reported among people seeking refuge in UNRWA shelters,” the organization said.
The people in the shelters are only partially safe from the Israeli air strikes, which are actually aimed at the terrorist militia Hamas. 23 refugees are said to have been killed in the shelters and 340 injured in the attacks. This is one of the reasons why Israel is accused of genocide against the Palestinian population. However, international lawyers contradict the accusation for several reasons.
A different scenario seems more likely at the moment anyway: “Look at the pictures of people without cars, on donkeys, hungry and barefoot, fleeing to the south in any way possible,” political analyst Talal Awkal told AP. Unlike Dibs, he stayed in Gaza City. He also did not comply with the Israeli government’s request to evacuate. Awkal doesn’t think it’s safer in the south. He describes the refugee movement as a “catastrophe for the Palestinians, a Nakba.”
Does Israel really want to empty Gaza?
His fears were recently confirmed by Israeli MP Ariel Kallner. After Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel on October 7th, he used drastic words to announce on the X platform (formerly Twitter) that the Palestinians would be expelled from the Gaza Strip. The message is only visible to a limited extent because it may conflict with the messaging platform’s rules. “One goal at the moment: Nakba! A Nakba that will eclipse the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and for anyone who dares to join!” wrote Kallner, who also belongs to the right-wing national Likud party. Such demands are particularly popular in Israel’s right-wing political camp.
At the end of October, the disclosure platform Wikileaks also reported on plans by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence to relocate people from the Gaza Strip to the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Israeli media also reported on the paper. According to the document shared by Wikileaks on X, the relocation will take place in a multi-stage process. Accordingly, the population in the Gaza Strip should be evacuated to the south, while the region in the north is attacked from the air. The second phase involves a ground offensive to occupy the entire Gaza Strip and “clear the underground bunkers of Hamas fighting.” At the same time, the civilians are to be brought into Egyptian territory.
If civilians don’t comply, the Israeli government wants to motivate people to give up their land. With a campaign among Western allies, the aim is to promote the resettlement as a humanitarian necessity and thus support it.
The situation in the Gaza Strip: Hamas fires rockets at Israel, while the Israeli military has attacked at least 11,000 targets in the Gaza Strip since the conflict began.
© DPA Infographics; As of November 2nd; Source: ISW, UN, Israeli Defense Forces, OSM Mitw.
The government under Benjamin Netanyahu is planning tent cities in Sinai and a subsequent humanitarian corridor. After that, cities will be built in the northern part of the peninsula, “from which there will be no return,” reports Wikileaks.
At least the Israeli government’s previous evacuation call and the ground offensive fit into the picture. People currently have no choice but to flee to the south – unless they decide to stay in the north – because Israel’s borders are sealed. However, Egypt initially opened the only border crossing to the Gaza Strip only to foreign civilians. But according to the intelligence document, Israel is also prepared for this: the USA should convince Egypt to take in the civilians. Will that work?
Former CIA employee Bruce Riedel is at least skeptical. In the star-Conversation he said: “It would be logical if Egypt took responsibility for Gaza. (…) But the Egyptians no longer want this responsibility.” Riedel believes that Israel has no plan at all for the Gaza Strip.
The document now published by the Israeli secret service is a clue. However, the plans described there do not have to be implemented in exactly the same way. The Ministry of Intelligence regularly produces studies and strategy papers. These are forwarded to the government and authorities – but do not have to be implemented. The division of Gaza into a northern and a southern part is likely to once again fuel the fears of Palestinians in the coastal strip.
Sources: Federal Agency for Civic Education, WikileaksUN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East, Associated Press“Mecomite“, “+972 magazines“, Twitter.