The head of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) accuses Israel of preparing to expel residents of the Gaza Strip to neighboring Egypt. The Israeli authorities deny this.
Just over two months after the start of the war, 80 percent of the Gaza Strip’s 2.4 million residents are on the run, the United Nations says. Initially, Israel mainly bombed the north of the Gaza Strip, from where the commandos of the fundamentalist movement Hamas had entered the country. But the violence then spread to the entire territory. The population is therefore forced further and further south, towards the Egyptian border.
In an opinion piece published in the newspaper The Los Angeles Times published on Saturday, Unrwa CEO Philippe Lazzarini regrets that civilians are concentrated in an area that is becoming increasingly smaller, and which is also being bombed, in the south of Gaza. “The United Nations and several Member States, including the United States, have strongly rejected the hypothesis of a forced expulsion of Gazans outside the Gaza Strip,” Lazzarini wrote. “But current events point to attempts to move Palestinians to Egypt so they stay or settle elsewhere.”
The heavy bombing in the north of the Gaza Strip and the flight of residents to the south were “the first phase of that scenario”. The next phase, according to Lazzarini, is to force civilians to leave Khan Younis, the major city in the south of the Gaza Strip, to crowd the border with Egypt. “If it continues down that path, leading to what many are already calling a second ‘Nakba,’ then Gaza will no longer be a land for the Palestinians.”
The ‘Nakba’ (‘disaster’ in Arabic) is the term Palestinians use to describe the exodus of 760,000 of them in 1948 during the war that led to the creation of the state of Israel. The Palestinians were forced to flee or were expelled from their homes.
“There is no Israeli plan to move Gaza residents to Egypt, there never was one and there never will be one,” an Israeli Defense Ministry spokesperson said. “It’s just not true.” Last week, a government spokesperson said that Israel only wants to protect civilians from the fighting, “but within the Gaza Strip.”
