2023-10-13 14:42:00
The Israeli army ordered them to leave the north of the Gaza Strip and go south. By car or on foot, Palestinians are fleeing by the thousands. But “to go where?”, they ask themselves, while the bombings strike everywhere.
“How long are we going to live under bombs and with death everywhere?” Oum Hossam, 29, told AFP, her four children with her and her cheeks covered in tears.
Since Hamas attacked it on Saturday, killing at least 1,300 people, mostly civilians, Israel has relentlessly shelled the Palestinian territory controlled by the Islamist movement Hamas, where at least 1,799 Palestinians have died, including more than 580 children.
Oum Hossam first had to leave his neighborhood under bombs to take refuge with relatives three days ago. From there, she said, “I was told that my house had been completely destroyed.”
“We no longer have a house, everything has been destroyed in Gaza. Where are the Arabs? They must protect us, that’s enough!” continues Oum Hossam, who is on the move again in less than a week .
The question of displacement is crucial in the Gaza Strip where more than 80% of the approximately 2.4 million inhabitants crowded there are refugees or descendants of refugees driven from their towns and villages at the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Pillows and plastic bags
And these painful memories once again suddenly resurfaced when the Israeli army dropped leaflets asking residents to flee “immediately” towards the south of the Gaza Strip, a cramped territory of 362 km2, limited to the north and east. east by Israel, to the west by the Mediterranean and to the south by Egypt.
Hours earlier, the UN said it had been informed by the army of an order to evacuate some 1.1 million residents to the south within 24 hours – a deadline which the army later extended .
Since then, on the roads, we see families carrying some belongings with them in plastic bags. Here, a child holds his pillow tightly in his hand. There, a woman gathered everything she could save into a leather bag that she carried on her shoulder.
And then there are those who decided to stay. Because no taxis are running anymore, because they don’t know anyone who could welcome them in the south or because they refuse to imagine leaving land that Israel could take back.
Hamas warned against any evacuations. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas’s great rival, also said it: this new displacement is “a second +Nakba+”, the “catastrophe” that the creation of Israel constitutes for the Palestinians.
“The enemy is fierce and he wants to terrorize us and force us into exile, but we will resist,” Abou Azzam told AFP, determined to stay in northern Gaza.
“Encore ?”
Mohammed Khaled, 43, also wants to stay.
“What does the world want from us? I’m already a refugee in Gaza and they want me to leave again?” he gets angry.
“What will we do in Rafah?”, the large southern city at the other end of Gaza, on the Egyptian border, barely 40 kilometers away, he said. “They want us to sleep in the streets with our children? I refuse! I don’t want this undignified life!”
Dana Saleh went to visit relatives in Khan Younès, in the south, with her husband, their children and her in-laws.
“I don’t know why we’re leaving,” says this 40-year-old Palestinian woman. “I’m afraid they will round us up in the south and bomb us to force us to force the border with Egypt.”
A border that Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian leaders have already called on Gazans not to cross, fearing that Israel will not let them return home.
“There is no safe place so we don’t know where to go,” explains Mohammed Abou Ali, from the Chati refugee camp, the largest in Gaza, in the north.
“Our children are under the ruins and we have neither water nor food,” he said, after Israel declared a total siege of Gaza, no longer allowing goods or fuel to enter and cutting off supplies of food. water and electricity.
“We came to take refuge with UNRWA”, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, he says. “And in front of their premises, I formally ask the UN: where are we going now?”
But even UNRWA decided to head south, where it transferred its operations center and personnel.
10/13/2023 7:15:21 p.m. – Rafah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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