THOUSANDS TOLD TO LEAVE KHAN YOUNIS HOSPITAL AFTER TWO-WEEK ISRAELI SIEGE
▶ Health official accuses army of ‘forced displacement’ after overnight strikes kill more than 100 across enclave
More than 10,000 displaced people who had sought shelter at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis began leaving yesterday after the Israeli military lifted its more than two-week siege of the complex.
Videos shared by medics and other Palestinian sources showed dozens of people, some holding white flags, walking out of the hospital carrying their belongings in plastic bags.
The Gaza Health Ministry told The National the people had been instructed to leave by Israeli troops, a day after they issued an order telling patients and staff to remain inside the hospital.
“It’s forced displacement,” said ministry director general Dr Medhat Abbas.
Ten people have been killed in the hospital over the past week. On Tuesday, Health Ministry spokesman Dr Ashraf Al Qudra said Israeli snipers had shot 13 civilians inside the complex, killing three.
Medical staff could not transfer their bodies to the mortuary for fear of being shot, he added.
The evacuation of the hospital comes as Israel’s military prepares a long-anticipated incursion into Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, on the border with Egypt.
About 1.4 million displaced Gazans – more than half of the enclave’s population – have sought refuge in the city and its surrounding areas to avoid the fighting in other parts of the enclave.
At least 103 people were killed and 145 were wounded in Israeli air strikes across Gaza on Tuesday night, the Health Ministry said yesterday.
More than 28,500 people have been killed in the enclave since the outbreak of war, the ministry said, while more than 68,200 have been wounded.
Israel began its air and ground campaign on October 7, when Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, killed about 1,200 people and took 240 hostages during attacks on communities in the south of the country.
In a social media post yesterday, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said five per cent of Gazans have been killed, injured or gone missing.
Since the war started, 17,000 children have been separated from their parents, he added.
On Tuesday, Gazans in Rafah,
Footage showed dozens of people, some with white flags, walking out of the hospital carrying their belongings
which the UN has called a “pressure cooker of despair”, cut through parts of the border fence separating the Palestinian enclave from Egypt.
An aid worker with Mercy Corps who has been in Rafah for 117 days told The National that the situation was “tragic” and too much to bear.
“Just yesterday, our neighbour died of a heart attack. He was a young man in his forties, unable to bear everything he saw through his lens,” he said.
The risks to Gazans go far beyond Israeli air strikes, the aid worker added.
“If people survive the bombings, they are exposed to many diseases due to the cold and rain, overcrowding, lack of washing water, poor hygiene, accumulation of garbage in the streets, and so on.”
Faten Mohammed, who fled to Rafah from Gaza city, said she worried that the unhygienic living conditions and medicine shortages in the city would cause diseases to spread.
Niveen Eouda, who was forced by the fighting to move several times before she reached Rafah, told The National that food shortages have caused prices to soar so high that she cannot buy anything her children ask for.
“They miss the taste of chocolate, and ask me if they can eat chicken and meat,” she said.
“Is it normal to starve people like this?”
If one were to take 1948 as its starting point, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had needed a solution for more than three quarters of a century. That is more than seven decades of suffering, occupation and, for too many Palestinians, displacement. If anything is to be learnt from this, it is that forcing people from their homeland leads not to security but lasting grievance, antagonism and resistance.
Sadly, the devastating war in Gaza shows that this lesson is not being learnt. Speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday, Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit got to the heart of the matter when he said: “The mentality to displace Palestinians and leave the Gaza Strip empty for Israelis to take over leaves a confrontation for the next 100 years.”
Although there is no official Israeli government policy to enable the return of its citizens to illegal settlements in Gaza – these were unilaterally evacuated in 2005 – there are worrying pronouncements from Israeli members of cabinet that new plans of displacement are being considered.
A major conference in Jerusalem at the end of January – which was attended by several Israeli ministers – heard calls for an occupation of Gaza, complete with maps showing proposed settlements and outposts.
Meanwhile, images have emerged of Israeli soldiers in the war-torn enclave making clear their desire to see Gaza reoccupied. One soldier in Gaza filmed himself amid ruined buildings in November saying: “Occupying, deporting and settling. Did you hear that Bibi [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu]? Occupying, deporting and settling.” Other soldiers have taken pictures from Gaza brandishing banners harking back to the 2005 evacuations and calling for resettlement.
Dangerous enthusiasm for displacement is to be found elsewhere in this conflict. On the same day that Mr Aboul Gheit was warning against driving Palestinians from Gaza, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah told supporters that 100,000 Israelis had been displaced from northern Israel due to the fighting since October 7, and warned that in an all-out war this number would rise sharply.
“You will have to find a place to shelter two million people from the north,” he said.
The reality is this: fantasies or threats of driving people out, whether it be from extremist settlers or Hezbollah, are deadend politics, and only add fuel to a raging fire. More insidious forms of displacement are also wrong – such as that in the West Bank, where illegal settlers are allowed to steal Palestinian land.
Tragedies continue to mount in Palestine, Israel and beyond. Policies of forced displacement are exacerbating a conflict that has already cost far too many lives. Although envisaging a political settlement at this time may seem premature, an end to the conflict must start from an acceptance of the fact that two peoples inhabit this particular parcel of land and – whatever happens in the future – will continue to do so.