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For civilians in Gaza, there’s increasingly nowhere to go. Israel’s campaign against the militant group Hamas has already driven out most of the population in the territory’s north, turning some of the densest urban areas on the planet into hollowed-out moonscapes. The focus has shifted to the south, where battles are intensifying around the city of Khan Younis, forcing hundreds of thousands more Palestinian civilians to flee their homes.
Israel has killed more than 18,000 people in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants operating in the enclave carried out an unprecedented strike on southern Israeli towns and kibbutzim, marking the bloodiest day in the history of the Jewish state. Even according to Israeli analyses, civilians, mostly women and children, may account for some two-thirds of that Palestinian death toll.
Roughly 1.9 million people in Gaza, or 85 percent of the territory’s population per United Nations data, are displaced. They are being crammed into facilities and spaces that cannot accommodate them close to adequately. Sanitation conditions are deplorable, clean water is difficult to find, disease is spreading, and hunger is rife. An analysis by the U.N. World Food Program found that half the population of Gaza is starving and 9 out of 10 people cannot eat every day. Aid workers operating in a tiny stretch of bare land by the sea known as al-Mawasi, where Israeli authorities urged Palestinians to go for safety, said they encountered people who had not eaten for three days.
U.N. officials across the organization’s agencies say the ongoing fighting prevents them from doing their jobs and proing critical humanitarian relief. The infrastructure that existed in the Gaza Strip has almost wholly collapsed. Health care in the territory is “on its knees,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Sunday, as supplies and hospital beds dwindle rapidly amid reports of bombardments around medical facilities.
At a regional forum in Doha, Qatar, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned of the possibility of mass displacement into Egypt. “There is no effective protection of civilians in Gaza,” he said. “I expect public order to completely break down soon, and an even worse situation could unfold.”
But to many in the Arab world, the idea of a Palestinian exodus pouring into Sinai is a nonstarter. For weeks, Arab governments have rejected the prospect of taking in refugees from Gaza — partially because of economic and security considerations, but primarily out of fear that Palestinians who flee Gaza will not be allowed to return. Given the 75-year history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, their concerns are not without credence. Numerous Gazans speaking to journalists say they would rather die in their own land than leave for a life in indefinite exile, a fate that has befallen generations of Palestinians elsewhere.
Some Arab officials accuse the Israelis of deliberately engineering this outcome. “What we are seeing in Gaza is not just simply the killing of innocent people and the destruction of their livelihoods, but a systematic effort to empty Gaza of its people,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said over the weekend, arguing that Israel’s conduct of the war was “within the legal definition of genocide.”
In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, noted how many U.N. member states, including the United States, are adamantly opposed to the forcible displacement of Gazans out of the Gaza Strip. “But the developments we are witnessing point to attempts to move Palestinians into Egypt, regardless of whether they stay there or are resettled elsewhere,” he added.
Israeli officials deny these claims. “There is not, never was and never will be an Israeli plan to move the residents of Gaza to Egypt,” a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Ministry told reporters. “This is simply not true.”
Israel’s Netanyahu is fighting two wars, and may not win either
There may be no concrete government plan, but there’s plenty of talk. A document leaked in late October from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry appeared to propose the permanent and forcible transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian population into Egypt. A leading Israeli think tank published a paper encouraging the country’s wartime cabinet to exploit the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip.” A host of right-wing Israeli politicians and former senior officials have openly called for the removal of Palestinian civilians, the destruction of their homes, the resettlement of Gaza by Israelis or some combination of the three.
Aware of the chatter, Egyptian officials have issued their own stern warnings. “It is not the way to deal with the conflict,” Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said at a panel event in Washington last week. “Palestinian civilians should not be penalized and should not leave their territory.” In private, Egypt has communicated that a wave of Palestinian refugees entering its territory would lead to “a rupture” in relations with Israel, according to Axios’s Barak Ra.
Egypt’s championing of Gaza’s plight has also buoyed support for President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi during a three-day presidential election that began Sunday. Victory for the coup-plotting strongman is not in doubt, but the crisis next door has helped shift voter concerns away from the country’s dismal economic situation and toward Palestinian suffering.
On Monday, a delegation of a dozen U.N. Security Council ambassadors went to the Egyptian side of Gaza’s Rafah border crossing to better understand the depths of the humanitarian calamity unfolding. “The reality is even worse than what words can speak,” Ecuador’s U.N. representative, Jose De La Gasca, told reporters after attending a briefing.
The envoys’ visit came after the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution Friday that was otherwise backed by 13 of the body’s 15 members, calling for an immediate cease-fire. The move intensified scrutiny on the Biden administration’s approach to the crisis, which involves shielding Israel from international censure and supporting its military with arms while privately cajoling Israeli counterparts to limit civilian harm in their campaign against Hamas.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered a curiously elliptical rebuke of Israel. “I think the intent is there” to ensure civilian safety, Blinken told CNN, speaking of Israel’s actions, “but the results are not always manifesting themselves.”
Other top diplomats are mincing their words less. “This is a war that cannot be won,” Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, said at the forum in Qatar. “Israel has created an amount of hatred that will haunt this region, that will define generations to come.”
