How NZ is blocking an escape route from Gaza

Asa New Zealand er–as an inhabitant of a small country at the edge of the world–I am used to feeling rather helpless or despondent as I watch calamities unfold from afar.

All too often, as in the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Burma, our government condemns but cannot influence. In other cases, like the detention of a million innocent Uyghurs in Chinese gulags, I may even feel that our elected representatives are not speaking frankly enough.

But never before have I felt that New Zealand is actually complicit, through sheer inaction, in an unfolding genocide.

What genocide? Well, let me add a few personal stories to the rapidly growing pile of evidence that future historians will pore through:

March 24: Israel fires an artillery shell at the house in Gaza City where my wife’s uncle Nasser and his family had been sheltering since their own home was destroyed in October. A piece of shrapnel hits Nasser, puncturing his brachial artery. He stumbles to Al-Ahli Hospital and miraculously finds one of Gaza’s surviving vascular surgeons. A surgeon himself,

Nasser then fashions an intravenous drip out of a tree branch. The next day, the house is destroyed by a (more accurate) IDF airstrike. In effect the whole family is saved by being at the hospital with Nasser, though all their life’s possessions are destroyed.

March 27: Another Israeli airstrike hits a new apartment building, constructed on land owned by my wife’s extended family. Three generations of her family planned to reside in that building – but now it has been razed to the ground. Thus does Israel destroy what little generational wealth Gazans have managed to preserve after 20 years of siege.

March 30: Israel drops a third bomb on the villa where my wife’s aunt Hanan and uncle Majdi are sheltering. Both of them are killed, along with several of their elderly female cousins. Three days later, when the IDF tanks finally withdraw, Hanan’s son finds their bodies after digging through the rubble by hand. He buries his mother and uncle in the back garden. In a sense he is one of the lucky ones, because by finding them, he no longer has to wonder how they died.

I could write thousands of words on the injustice of these and similar bombings, and ponder the question of how Gazans can possibly rebuild their lives when the onslaught ends. But instead I want to focus on something else. Dozens of my wife’s surviving family members remain trapped in Gaza. In the coming weeks, many more are likely to be maimed like Nasser, or murdered like Hanan and Majdi.

Hundreds of other Palestinian families with ties to New Zealand are in exactly the same position, and the New Zealand Government has the power to issue humanitarian visas to all of them. But it refuses to act.

Were our Government to issue humanitarian visas, very few Palestinian refugees would actually come here; they would merely use the visas to cross safely into Egypt. Such visas are among the few avenues of escape left to the innocent men, women, and children of Gaza, and New Zealand’s ongoing failure to arrange them – to save so many lives, at such little cost – constitutes a moral failure of which our representatives should be ashamed.

On February 23, a full month before the bombings described above, my wife wrote a letter to Minister of Immigration Erica Stanford. “My family lives (so far at least) in Gaza,” she wrote;

“I have 10 uncles and aunts on both sides of my family, living there with their children and grandchildren. So far, all but two lost their homes and are left running around from one spot to another trying to flee bombs like rats trapped in a torture maze...

“Those in my family who haven’t moved to the south are struggling every day to find some flour and rice for hundreds of US dollars. They’re on the brink of starvation. They have two newborn babies and aren’t able to source formula milk for them.

“I have been feeling extremely let down by Immigration NZ for not introducing any form of visa that can allow my family to exit... I can’t do anything to save my own family, but I can write this email. You’re in power, you can use it to actually save lives. Please do.”

She never received a response.

Were our Government to issue humanitarian visas, very few Palestinian refugees would actually come here; they would merely use the visas to cross safely into Egypt.

Matt Hayes is a writer based in Kāpiti.