Gaza Trapped People
Updated 2024-08-25
2024-08-16 UNRWA Says There Is ‘Nowhere to Go’ as Israel Orders Evacuation of Gaza Safe Zones Following a series of evacuation orders this week, Israeli forces issued another on Friday for areas in central and southern Gaza, including “safe zones,” leaving Palestinian families gripped with fear and with “nowhere to go,” according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Israel’s Arabic spokesperson announced on social media that people in six neighborhood blocks in various towns, several of which were part of a proclaimed humanitarian zone, must “immediately move,” leading to a scramble of evacuations in those areas.
“Once again, fear spreads as families have nowhere to go,” UNRWA wrote on social media. “People remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-evacuation-unrwa-nowhere-to-go
2024-03-30 Opinion: No exit in Gaza — left with no other options, residents should have a right to flee n the 1990s, extremists aiming to change Bosnia and Herzegovina’s demographic map through “ethnic cleansing” terrorized civilians into leaving their homes. Horrified at witnessing violent forced displacement in real time and wanting to stop it, the then-UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata extolled a new principle she called “preventive protection” and used the term “right to remain.”
But the UN refugee agency and other humanitarian actors could not stop the ethnic cleansing. To make matters worse, European states seized on the “right to remain” as a rationale to block asylum seekers from fleeing Bosnia. The UN Security Council declared the creation of “safe areas” to contain and protect the displaced people within Bosnia. We know how that story ended: The mass graves of men massacred at Srebrenica, one of those so-called safe areas, stand as testament to the international community’s failure to protect civilians.
Now, 30 years later, 2.3 million Palestinians are trapped in Gaza, but unlike Bosnia, there is no place within that small, densely populated territory that even purports to be safe. Most of Gaza’s population has been displaced, many ordered to evacuate one area only to be bombed, starved and forced to flee again—and again. More than 1 million people who have fled to Rafah on Gaza’s far southern border with Egypt live in fear as an Israeli military ground operation on Rafah and another mass evacuation looms.
Like Ogata 30 years ago, my organization, Human Rights Watch, along with countless others, has been trying to mobilize international action to stop further mass atrocities. We have been calling for Israel to respect the right of Palestinians to return to the areas they have been displaced from in Gaza, but also for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to what is now Israel. More than 80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees, people who were expelled or fled in 1948 from what is now Israel and their descendants, in what Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe.
Palestinians, like everyone everywhere, have the right to live in dignity in their homes. They also have the right to leave for their own security and to return in safety and dignity. Stopping forced displacement and other atrocity crimes from occurring is the top priority at this moment. But when all other human rights are denied, the right to flee is the last remaining option. That option cannot be closed. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/opinion-no-exit-in-gaza-left-with-no-other-options-residents-should-have-a-right-to-flee/ar-BB1kO7Bc?
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