Gaza, Hamas's Crowded Redoubt

"There is a strong international consensus that Israel's prosecution of the war against Hamas should permit civilians to safely evacuate Gaza City and northern Gaza. where Israeli forces have surrounded the territory where Hamas is dug in -- or dug under, better to say, in the tunnels."

"This is an acknowledgement that Hamas embeds its fighters and weaponry amid the civilian population, making high civilian casualties inevitable."

Father Raymond J. de Souza, journalist, National Post

Palestinians fleeing Gaza city by heading south. AFP

 

Gaza as a region in what the Romans named 'Palestine' denoting the Jewish province they occupied under Roman domination, is named often in ancient texts. It was part of Egypt in a period long predating the Christian era. Most Gazan Palestinians migrated from modern Egypt into a part of the Middle East that was sparsely inhabited, but where Jews lived and which began to distinguish itself as a desert that could be made arable with adequate care and irrigation.

In the relatively modern era before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when the combined Middle East armies of the Arab/Muslim countries surrounding the fledgling Jewish state marched in to destroy it, Egypt had control of the Gaza Strip; it has a partly contiguous border into the Sinai. In 1967 another war saw Israel take both the Sinai and Gaza. When a peace accord was signed between Egypt and Israel in 1978, Israel relinquished the Sinai back to Egypt, but Egypt was not interested in regaining Gaza. In 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.

What followed was a war between Fatah (the governing party in the West Bank) and Hamas for control of Gaza, and Hamas, waging a brutal war against the mostly secular Fatah, won the battle, after a majority democratic vote in 2007, the last one ever held in either the West Bank or Gaza. With Islamist Gaza and its charter mission to destroy Israel governing the Gaza Strip, Israel closed its border by blocking Gaza, and Egypt for its own reasons, followed suit.

In the wake of terrorist Hamas's latest violent outrage against Israel in its October 7 invasion of southern Israel at the Gaza border where it slaughtered 1,400 Jewish children, their parents, raped girls and women, and took 240 hostages back to Gaza, unleashing an Israeli response that saw the Israel Defense Forces pounding Hamas positions in Gaza and Gaza City, the world awakened both to more of Hamas atrocities committed against Israel, and the resulting plight of Gaza's Palestinian population under fire.

The crowded enclave has a population of over 2 million people, and it has always been Hamas's modus operandi to install its rocket launch sites and weapons depots in or close to hospitals, multiple dwellings, schools and mosques. Israel sent out copious messages by cellphone, pamphlets and other means to persuade civilians to leave areas where Hamas forces are concentrated. The result is a huge population of internally displaced people in a tight geography.

The creation of a humanitarian situation of grave order. One that could be handily solved if any of its neighbours were to open their borders to absorb the Palestinians. Egypt's huge population of over 100M could readily absorb a million Palestinians. Jordan, already comprised of a population 2/3 Palestinian, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq and Syria could absorb the rest. Oh, right, Syria has slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinians in its civil war. Oh, right, Jordan too slaughtered Palestinians during Black September.

The original 'refugees', numbering about 850,000 in 1948 at the creation of the State of Israel, could have been absorbed by neighbouring Arab nations without much trouble at all. They weren't for several reasons; one, because no other country wanted them; they meant trouble as a restive, angry, 'victimized' vengeance-wrought people, and two, keeping them in the position of 'refugees' and encouraging them to vent their violent spleen at the Jewish State served the Arab states well in their rage over a non-Muslim nation within a Muslim Middle East.

Elsewhere in the world ongoing wars in Africa, in Latin America, continue to create refugees. Whom neighbouring countries tend to absorb. Alternately, under the auspices of the United Nations, they are eventually absorbed by other UN nations willing to accept them. Millions of Syrians, displaced by the civil war engaged by the Syrian regime against its own, have been absorbed worldwide. As have been Ukrainians, fleeing the onslaught brought to their country by Russia.

The United Nations preferred to become complicit with the Arab/Muslim countries that refused to absorb the Palestinians, and created a permanent UN force to focus on the plight of Palestinian refugees, providing endless financial aid as well as administrative. At the same time as 850,000 Palestinian Arabs fled, a like number of Arabized Jews who had lived for millennia in Arab countries were summarily expelled from Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Libya and other Middle East and North African countries.

Iraqi Jews flee as refugees to Israel

 

Most of them fled to Israel, others migrated elsewhere, penniless, without possessions, their properties confiscated by the Arab nations expelling them in anger over the creation of the State of Israel. No United Nations mission was created to tend to their needs; their struggle to survive and to make new lives for themselves was theirs alone, excepting the aid given them in Israel.