The sight of tent cities for Palestinians displaced inside war-torn Gaza evokes darkish historic recollections for Israel’s Arab neighbors, particularly Egypt and Jordan.
“That’s how the Nakba started,” says the Gaza-based rights group Al Mezan, reflecting regional suspicions that Israel is planning to empty the coastal territory.
The Nakba, or “catastrophe,” is how the Arab world refers back to the exodus or compelled displacement of 760,000 Palestinians within the conflict that led to the creation of Israel 75 years in the past.
The worry of historical past repeating itself has been stoked as Israel carried out indiscriminate bombing of the blockaded territory for the reason that Oct. 7 Hamas incursion.
The Gaza Strip is generally populated by Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who’ve now endured over two weeks of withering bombardment that the Hamas-run Health Ministry says has killed over 5,700 folks.
So Israeli warnings to evacuate the north of the territory forward of a looming floor invasion have raised deeper historic fears, with 1 million Gazans already compelled out of their houses.
The solely potential manner out of Gaza that Israel doesn’t management is the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
Egypt has allowed support convoys into Gaza by Rafah after Israel stopped bombing the Palestinian aspect underneath a U.S.-brokered deal – however there was no mass flight of refugees heading the opposite manner.
Egypt fears that throwing open the gates might facilitate Israeli plans for a compelled mass eviction of Palestinians, a lot of whom are actually homeless, sleeping within the open or sheltered in U.N. tents.
Regional implications
The Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights stated: “When we see the tents on the border at the moment, it ought to give the chills to anybody who is aware of Palestinian historical past – the tents, that is how the Nakba began.
“Most people would rather die in Gaza than be made a refugee again.”
Israel claims its eviction order for northern Gaza goals to get Palestinian civilians out of the way in which because it goes after Hamas and hopes to rescue greater than 220 hostages.
But the suspicion Israel is planning a mass eviction has been bolstered by former Israeli officers who’ve instructed in TV interviews that Egypt might construct huge tent cities in its Sinai desert, with worldwide funding.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has burdened that Israel as an occupying power has accountability for Palestinian civilians underneath worldwide regulation.
“If the idea is forced displacement, there is the Negev,” he stated, referring to the desert lands of southern Israel.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas have warned that if Israel managed to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, it might wish to do the identical within the occupied West Bank sooner or later.
Egypt additionally has motive to worry the safety implications of internet hosting displaced Gazans on its territory.
The presence of Palestinian refugees and resistance teams has beforehand pulled their host nations into battle – Jordan within the Seventies and Lebanon within the Nineteen Eighties.
In Jordan, residence to many Palestinians, the late King Hussein within the Seventies accused Palestinian fighters of constructing a “state within a state” and in search of to take over the nation.
Sinai a ‘pink line’
To forestall this, Jordan’s Black September offensive drove Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization to go away Jordan for Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Christian events had the identical suspicion and fought the PLO throughout the civil conflict. Arafat and his fighters had been compelled to go away within the wake of Israel’s full-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
The PLO management dispersed to Tunisia and Yemen, whereas the occupied Palestinian territories had been gripped by the primary intifada or rebellion in 1987.
The 1993 Oslo Accords had been meant to usher in a Palestinian state, however that dream fizzled and critical talks have stalled for the previous decade.
The thought of a substitute Palestinian homeland resurfaced underneath former U.S. President Donald Trump, whose peace plan, rejected as biased by Palestinians, proposed an industrial zone within the Sinai to create jobs for Gazans.
Cairo too would dismiss it out of hand, analysts say.
“The Sinai is a red line for the Egyptians,” stated political scientist Sarah Daoud, who burdened that “this was already the case under Hosni Mubarak,” the previous president deposed in 2011.
“For Egypt, its territorial integrity is non-negotiable,” she stated.
The Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied in 1967, was the location of battles wherein many Egyptian troopers died earlier than Cairo regained it underneath its 1979 peace cope with Israel.
Source: www.dailysabah.com