JERUSALEM — Over the past two years since Russian forces invaded Ukraine, countries around the world have stepped up to help more than 6.5 million Ukrainian citizens flee the ongoing fighting.
In Syria, more than 12 million forcibly displaced civilians during the 13-year civil war have managed to leave the war-torn country and resettle within the region and beyond. Afghanistan, where the Islamic extremist Taliban group returned to power in 2021, now has more than 2.6 million people scattered around the world.
The number of people in need of permanent displacement, or at least some respite from the ongoing unrest, continues to grow, according to data provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
While countries around the world, including the United States, continue to provide safe haven to some people, an estimated 190 people are displaced and suffering after Israel’s nearly five-month war with extremist terrorism. For millions of Palestinians, there is no such escape. Hamas group.
The mere proposal to relocate these desperate men, women, and children, even temporarily, just a few miles across the border in a Palestinian enclave, was harshly criticized and quickly rejected. .
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On January 22, 2024, in the fourth month of the Iron Sword War, people pass through a humanitarian corridor opened by the IDF in the Gaza Strip after the fight against the terrorist organization Hamas intensifies and the siege against Khan Yunis intensifies. Gazans depart for Rafah in the south. (Majidi Fatih/TPS)
On October 7, thousands of Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and kidnapping 240 others. This triggered Israeli land and air attacks that Hamas officials now say have killed more than 29,000 Gazans.
Since then, even countries sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, including neighboring Arab states, have refused to provide any kind of shelter to Gaza’s civilians.
“Palestinians are the only people in the world who are not considered for migration.”
Indeed, Egypt, the Strip’s neighbor to the south, has strengthened its border fence and deployed additional troops in case Palestinians may attempt to enter the territory in search of rest and aid.
In Europe, Thomas Corbett Dillon, a UK-based political commentator and former adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, told Fox News Digital that there was a reluctance to provide shelter to civilians in Gaza. He said this is mainly due to past waves of refugees and immigrants. They have not been able to assimilate into our culture,” he claimed.
“Europe’s appetite for refugees is over,” Corbett Dillon said, adding that recent opinion polls in the UK and across Europe consistently show that the majority do not want any more refugees. “I have,” he added.
On April 8, 2022, refugees from neighboring Ukraine fleeing war at the Medica border crossing in southeastern Poland. (AP/Sergey Grits)
Corbett Dillon said the rejection of Palestinian refugees was not due to anti-Israel bias, but rather an overall response to opening the door to further immigration, including both those fleeing war and those seeking better economic opportunities. He said that it was based on a rejection of the law.
“We have seen this in Syria and Ukraine, but Gaza is the only place where refugee groups are reluctant to give options to those who want to leave.”
“Europe is struggling,” he said. “Flooding the continent with more people taking from the system than we put in will only make Europe’s crisis worse.”
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Afghan refugees arrive in Germany. (Department of Defense)
For Arab states, rejecting even the discussion of providing shelter to Palestinians from Gaza is a more personal matter.
Hussein Abdul-Hussein, a researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said: “Palestinians’ record in Arab countries was not of well-behaved guests, so Arab countries were reluctant to accept any number of guests from Gaza.” He explained.
He said the migration of Palestinians to Arab countries in the past has caused friction and led to conflicts, such as in Jordan, where Palestinian militants have tried to overthrow the government, and in Lebanon, where Palestinian terrorists have drawn Israel into multiple wars. He pointed out that there are even cases.
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Additionally, Abdul-Hussein said it would be “politically harmful” for most Arab leaders to urge Palestinians to leave their coastal enclaves, even if it meant saving lives.
Syrian refugees line up to register their names at an employment agency at Azraq refugee camp, 100 miles east of Amman, Jordan, on February 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Lard Adire, File)
“I don’t want any Arab official to be seen as the one calling on Palestinians to surrender their territory to Israeli forces,” he said. “Prioritizing land over Palestinian quality of life is at the heart of the problem and Palestinian misery.”
Abdul-Hussein said that while many countries and activists are calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, he wants “a victory for the Palestinians over Israel” and calls for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He said he is holding back.
Al-Hawl refugee camp in northeastern Syria (Getty Images)
“Keeping Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way will weaken Hamas’s position and allow for a faster Israeli victory,” he said. “The international community treats the Israeli-Palestinian conflict according to an unrealistic theoretical framework, suggesting that the solution is territoriality, regardless of Palestinian interests.”
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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (left) meets with King Abdullah II of Jordan in Amman, Jordan, on February 25, 2024. (Palestinian Presidential Office/Handout/Anadolu, via Getty Images)
Referring to UNRWA, the United Nations agency that specializes in providing assistance to Palestinian refugees, Abdul-Hussein said, “The global model is inefficient and is likely to perpetuate the conflict, such as giving hereditary Palestinian ‘refugee’ status.” “I’m letting them do it,” he said.
“On a per capita basis, Palestinian ‘refugees’ receive more global attention and resources than all other displaced people on earth,” he said. “This global generosity has turned humanitarian aid and institutions into an industry that many people have a vested interest in and want to see continue.”
Abdul Hussein said the United Nations, which has successfully resettled refugees from all other conflicts, could also have set up temporary camps for Gazans in Sinai province, a sparsely populated Egyptian territory. He pointed out that there is.
Palestinians line up outside the UNRWA aid distribution center in the city of Deir al-Balah in the center of the Gaza Strip, waiting to receive supplies from a humanitarian aid convoy passing through the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border in Deir al-Balah. People (December 10) 2023. (Majidi Fatih/TPS)
“The United Nations appears reluctant to impose such a decision on Egypt,” he said, noting that international organizations have also refrained from putting pressure on Hamas to surrender, adding: “No further Gaza and another way to prevent deaths in Israel.…The United Nations has decided to apply it to Israel. If this is not prejudice, I don’t know what is.”
When asked by Fox News Digital whether UNRWA has considered or discussed supporting Gazans who wish to leave the Strip, even temporarily during the fighting, Juliet Touma, UNRWA’s communications director, said: He answered sharply.
“We are not participating in any forced evacuations,” she said.
“There is little confidence that the Israeli government will ultimately allow displaced Palestinians to return to Gaza.”
Israel has long argued that UNRWA’s unprecedented approach to assisting Palestinian refugees will only perpetuate the decades-old conflict between the two countries. The agency, created to provide shelter, welfare and medical services to the approximately 750,000 Palestinians who were displaced when Israel was founded in 1948, has created more refugees than found lasting solutions. continuing.
It currently works with more than 5.9 million Palestinian refugees who are descendants of the original group, not only in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the war-torn Gaza Strip, but also in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Women walk in front of a mural depicting the late Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Ain El Helweh, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, near the southern coastal city of Sidon, January 31, 2020. . (Mahmoud Zaiyat/AFP via Getty Images)
Following clear evidence that individuals employed by UNRWA participated in the October 7 atrocities against Israel, will Israeli authorities disband the agency and establish a new organization to assist Palestinian refugees? , are increasingly calling for them to be brought under the broader UNHCR umbrella.
“Egypt, not Israel, controls the border with the Gaza Strip, so there is no one to prevent them from returning whenever they wish to return.”
“The world has a legal obligation under international law to protect Palestinian civilians from forced displacement, indiscriminate harm, collective punishment, and atrocious crimes,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the U.S.-based Refugees International Association, told Fox News Digital. There is,” he said.
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Smoke and flames rise after an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, Gaza, November 2, 2023. (Ali Jadala/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Konyndyk said few countries would help Gazans escape without reliable guarantees that they would one day be able to return to the Gaza Strip.
“No country in the region wants to be seen as facilitating ethnic cleansing, and I think in many countries that is the case,” Konyndyk said. “The aim of providing shelter to people fleeing extreme violence should be to provide temporary protection until the conflict ends, rather than permanent relocation.
“There is little confidence that the Israeli government will ultimately allow displaced Palestinians to return to Gaza, and therefore there is a lack of enthusiasm for accepting Palestinian refugees from this conflict.”
Gaza residents and other foreigners with foreign passports wait at the Rafah border crossing in the southern part of the Gaza Strip in Rafah, Gaza Strip. It will enter Egypt on November 1, 2023, with approval from the Egyptian side for the first time since Operation Iron Sword began on October 7, 2023. (Majidi Fatih/TPS)
A senior Israeli government official told Fox News Digital that claims of ethnic cleansing by Israel in the Gaza Strip are false and hypocritical.
“In every situation of war or conflict, there are people who want to leave,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation. “We have seen this in Syria and Ukraine, but only in Gaza are refugee groups reluctant to give options to those who wish to leave.
“Palestinians are the only people in the world who are not even considered for migration,” the official said. “I think there are a lot of people in Gaza who want to start a new life somewhere else.”
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The official noted that about 1,000 Gazans with relatives in Canada were recently given safe haven and have already started new lives.
“More countries could offer it to the people of Gaza, but instead the majority will remain there and the world will prevent them from leaving,” the official said. He also denied claims that refugees from the Gaza Strip would eventually be able to return home. The war ends.
“Egypt, not Israel, controls the border with the Gaza Strip, so there is no one to prevent them from doing so whenever they want to return home,” the official said.
