Gaza Palestinians Flee for Their Lives, But There’s Nowhere To Run – Rolling Stone

On Tuesday, Mohammed Abdallah was taking care of his wheelchair-bound mother in the dark. Constant Israeli air strikes regularly shook her Gaza city apartment building. He was in mourning for four cousins killed by Israeli bombs that flattened a market in the Jabalia Refugee camp earlier. Out of power and out of water with fuel in short supply since Israel cut off Gaza’s access, his mother and him were stuck on the fifth floor with no easy way out. On Friday morning, as Israeli officials ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to flee northern Gaza, Abdallah, 36, and a neighbor carried his mother and then her wheelchair down the stairs and into emptying streets to try and flee for their lives.

“I don’t know where to go,” he says on the phone, standing in the street with no car and no one able to take them south.

Dropping 6,000 bombs on the besieged Gaza strip in a week, the Israeli military has told half of Gaza’s residents to relocate amidst an ongoing assault and ground incursions that people fear are the precursor to a full-scale invasion. More than 2,000 Palestinians and 1,300 Israelis have been killed since bloody fighting erupted last Saturday. That’s when a multi-pronged surprise attack led by Hamas massacred hundreds of Israeli civilians and kidnapped an estimated 100 more. 

Mohammad Rajoub, 40, spent Tuesday at home taking in a family who fled Israeli airstrikes in central Gaza. He did this while trying to pump out a storm flood from his living room and keeping an eye on his kids as loud blasts from exploding Israeli shells echoed through the streets. On Thursday, he was at a funeral for a cousin killed in central Gaza by Israeli bombing.

At the beginning of Israel’s ground invasion during 2014, Rajoub stood next to me on a street outside eastern Gaza’s Al Shujaya neighborhood after it withstood a night of intense shelling. We watched as fathers with kids on their shoulders and mothers carrying belongings in plastic bags stumble away from the shattered buildings and carnage on the road to Al Shifa Hospital, where they hoped to find some refuge in a tent city. A family staggers past, terrified. “It’s like a modern Nakba,” he said, using the Arabic term for catastrophe that refers to Israel’s displacement of at least 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war, a moment that defines the collective Palestinian experience, especially in Gaza, where so much of the population are he descendants of those refugees.  

And while panic and the fear of a historic expulsion permeates Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank are watching in horror amidst stringent lockdown conditions, escalating army raids, and settler attacks. Their question: how will they come for us next?

A man who loves cars, Rajoub spent the 2014 war piling flack jacketed journalists into his black Nissan and driving at breakneck speeds behind ambulances towards bombed homes. He just wanted to be out driving, but had resigned himself to dying at home.

By Friday morning, that had all changed. After a call about Israel’s threat from a colleague, he was packing his family into his car and doing something he had been able to avoid during all the past Gaza wars, leaving everything to save his family and run for his life. “I’m leaving, we’ve got no choice,” he said over the phone in a panicked voice. After that his phone was dead.

For Abdallah, the old safety that people found in Shifa hospital’s parking lot during past wars was no more a refuge. But he hoped it would at least be a place he and his mother could catch a ride out of Gaza city. Pushing her down empty streets in the direction of a hospital in chaos, he sent his last message, a video of an empty war damaged street in bright afternoon sun. “This is where I went to school,” he said, panning across the stucco building. Then, his line too went dead.

At home in Ramallah under a strict lockdown that has frozen Palestinians in place, blocking them from traveling through checkpoints in occupied West Bank towns, Hanan Asrawi, a leading Palestinian national activist and intellectual, is clear about the historic moment Palestinians are being forced to relive.

“Whole families are being eradicated [by bombing] as well as what they call ‘evacuations,’ which are expulsions,” says the 77-year-old who was a leader in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Her roots are in the 1987 popular uprising known as The First Intifada, and has long struggled to get the world to address the costs of Palestinian oppression and dispossession. Today, however, she just sees dramatic escalations of violence unabated. “Everybody’s seeing it and nobody’s stopping it,” she says about the images coming out of Gaza. “The world is giving Israel a free pass.”

Ashrawi says that these fears of a new Nakba didn’t just start on Friday or with Israel’s decision to flatten the strip in retaliation. Rather, she points to the government, Israel’s most right-wing in history. As settlers escalated attacks over the last year and the army increased its West Bank raids, the calls for annexation and seizing more Palestinian land have intensified.

With Settler Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich calling to wipe the Occupied West Bank town of Huwwara off the map, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir stirring up a national guard that looks more like a state-sponsored settler militia, Ashrawi sees this attack as the extension of its political agenda. The calls for expulsion in Gaza are long baked into the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and now Ashrawi fears they have their opportunity to act on them, and will also turn on the West Bank to use the spreading conflict to get as much land as possible and dispossess of Palestinians in all the occupied territories.

“Am I going to sit back and worry that I might be expelled?” she asks rhetorically. “No! Palestinians are staying, they are not going to accept any kind of expulsion.”