Why Can't Gazans Leave?

[miniaturepixieonacid]

There is probably a very simple answer to this that I missed in early news reports.

It's so awful watching News Feeds that essentially seem to say that Gazans are having to move around in a cat and mouse game with the IDF to avoid bombs but have nowhere left to go.

I am very aware that war has casualties and other countries are at war. I am not necessarily saying that IDF should stop fighting.

But this war is different in that all civilians seem to be trapped. Normally war creates refugees. Ukrainians, Afghans, Syrians - they were able to get out. Not all, I know, but movement was an option and it kept civilian casualties down. Why can't Gazans leave Gaza?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and-other-countries-on-gaza-voluntary-migration-plan/

The “voluntary” resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza is slowly becoming a key official policy of the government, with a senior official saying that Israel has held talks with several countries for their potential absorption.

Last Monday, Netanyahu told a Likud faction meeting that he is working to facilitate the voluntary migration of Gazans to other countries.

Just awful, those poor children. How can they designate a safe zone and then drop a bomb on it?!

Latest on the Philadelphia Corridor btwn Gaza and Egypt

Egypt has rejected a proposal by Israel for greater Israeli oversight over the buffer zone on the Egypt-Gaza border, according to a report.

Egyptian security sources told Reuters that Israel has approached Egypt about securing the Philadelphia Corridor, a narrow buffer zone along the border, as part of Israeli plans to prevent future attacks.

An Israeli official said joint monitoring Philadelphi Corridor with Egypt was among issues that have been discussed by the countries. Asked if Egypt had refused, the Israeli official said: “I’m not aware of that.”

Your post is a bit of a mess. 🙈

"....the IRA killed over 3000 in total..."

Did they, aye?! 🙈

Aside from your lines giving the impression PIRA murdered over 3,000 people in London in total....the figure you gave for PIRAs kill count is very obviously wrong.

Where did you get that from?!

IIRC, PIRA murdered about 1,771 people. Stats vary slightly depending on which set and time frame you're looking at, but it's no more than 1,800.

PIRA would have loved to have murdered far more people than they actually managed to, let me tell you!

"...they blew up the British Government..."

No, they didn't! PIRA tried AND failed to blow up Thatcher's Cabinet, in fact. Not one Government Minister was killed in the 1984 Brighton Hotel bombing. Five people died, but not Government Ministers.

Far more accurate and correct to say PIRA blew up the hotel. Once.

Not in London.

"....they blew up people at memorial services..."

Correct there, but it was just the one at Enniskillen. The other one on the same day a few miles away in 1987 failed to detonate.

Hyde Park wasn't even memorial service - it was the Changing Of The Guard. Regent's Park bomb also wasn't a memorial service - it was a lunchtime bandstand concert.

I say that because you said "memorial services", plural. Again, not in London.

"....people inc soldiers were kidnapped..."

Correct. Jean McConville and Captain Robert Nairac being the better known cases.

But not in London.

"....they attacked and murdered members of the Royal family..."

Only Mounbatten was attacked and murdered. A plot in the United States against the late Queen was foiled which wasn't a PIRA plot. A PIRA plot against the Queen was Shetland in 1981 - premature explosion and PIRA man employed unknowingly by BP fled the island. Forgotten not long after due to news of Pope John Paul II assassination attempt.

Not very successful at it. Again, not in London.

"...they murdered two soldiers "live" on TV."

Correct. The two Corporals and the priest who tried to save them was threatened with a bullet in his head.

But:

"Yes the British did try and hunt down the terrorists but they used special forces, intelligence led strikes...... they didn't use WW2 tactics and indiscriminate bombing, nor did they starve out West Belfast or attempt to get the Catholics to move to the ROI.

Israel is using every trick in the book to try and defend what they are doing, which is murder, they are committing war crimes, ignoring every rule written about protecting civilian populations in a war zone, they behaving worse than even the Russians in Ukraine."

The above is a False Equivalence Fallacy and demonstrates your lack of knowledge regarding operations required against PIRA and Hamas respectively.

Even worse, it shows you don't really understand the massive differences in theeat levels faced by the British and Israeli States respectively.

PIRA didn't have anywhere close to the military capabilities of Hamas, so it was never going to be the case where the British Government was going to bomb single streets or use full military capabilities.

Indeed, PIRA only managed to murder 0.5% of the total British Army deployment. Road traffic accidents claimed another 0.5% of British Army personnel - this was actually marginally higher than PIRA murders.

The British Army acted with restraint (more likely to be arrested than killed) but the shift in tactics from 1974 onwards wasn't really based on "hearts and minds". It was based on undermining PIRA and UVF from within - hence Operation Eagle targeted Republicans and Operation Torniquet targeted Loyalists.

The hearts and minds wasn't necessary as Republican and Loyalist terrorists didn't have majority support across Northern Ireland as a whole. Far from it.

So, the use of Special Forces against terrorist groups is one method - this is how the UK did it. Exactly why the 14 Intelligence Company was formed by SAS members and why RUC Special Branch formed E4HSU. Both were very effective. 14 Int Coy is now SRR so that intelligence methods learned during the Troubles wasn't lost. SRR does operate throughout the UK to this day.

Israel, on the other hand, is facing a very different kind of terrorist threat. Hamas makes PIRA look like a nursery group! Consider how PIRA murdered 1,800 in total over nearly four decades yet Hamas murdered 1,200 on just the 7th October 2023!

Hamas is backed by a rogue State (Iran) whereas PIRA was an enemy of the Republic of Ireland Government as well as the UK Government.

Hamas are embedded into the social fabric of Gaza in a way PIRA and UVF were not in Northern Ireland. Indeed, PIRA would have loved to have been that deeply embedded.

That's without talking about Hamas' weapons arsenal and military strategy. Again, they blow PIRA right out of the water!

My point is what worked against PIRA in Northern Ireland won't really work against Hamas in Gaza.

The UK has NOT faced the level of threat Israel has since the Nazis in WW2. Anyone with decent knowledge of military history would know that. Meaning if the UK faced the same level of threat with PIRA, it absolutely would have reacted far, far differently than it did in reality. PIRA simply weren't a big enough threat to warrant much stronger action.

Simply put, PIRA came a cropper against the SAS and E4-HMSU. Indeed, SAS soldiers were able to fight PIRA members including Ivor Bell in 1996 in order to arrest them. Two years earlier and those terrorists would have faced SAS weaponry, so should count themselves lucky.

can you imagine the Israeli Special Forces being able to do the same against Hamas?!

Of course not! 🤦‍♂️

I don't think any State would have much of a coherent long term strategy at first for dealing with a terrorist group like Hamas.

Much less one for long term peace.

Indeed, it took the British Security Forces a while to develop an effective strategy against PIRA - about 4-5 years. There is ZERO reason to think it wouldn't take Israel a while to develop an effective strategy against Hamas too.

Once again, an ill-informed post by someone who believes they understand both conflicts whilst failing to grasp that the conflict in Northern Ireland was completely different to that in the Middle East.

What we had wasn't a war as PIRA failed in their goal of making it a war by any reasonable description as they lacked the military expertise plus effectiveness to do so. No, we had a campaign of terrorism that ultimately ended in failure.

The conflict in the Middle East easily fits the description of a war, especially as the people there couldn't live life the way the vast majority in Northern Ireland did.

I hope to see no more blatant and disingenuous false equivalences drawn between Northern Ireland and Israel-Gaza. The only real link is the one between PIRA/PSF and Hamas. That's it.

In Northern Ireland, Republican and Loyalist terrorists were engaging in fantasy war by using terms such as "army, brigade, battalion, soldiers, copying military badges", etc. But their setup was nothing like that of an actual Army.

Hamas, on the other hand, does not need to play at fantasy war as it is itself a small army, able to mass manufacture locally made weapons, has a military as well as governmental structure I've posted months ago, etc.

Massive differences, so it's embarrassing to see the false equivalence trotted out. 🙈

@DownNative

No its not, you ve just spent a lot of time & effort defending the mass killing of children and destruction of health facilities in Gaza.

3000 or 1800, tell the difference to Mrs Tebbit (if you could) ... the IRA killed 5 people in Brighton, an act of war if a state had done it.

The point is Israel is not only behaving like Russia in Ukraine (worse imho) but its counter productive, as the USA have acknowledged.

Maybe listen to some of the UK medics who have been in Gaza very recently before you come out with your pro Israel guff? thats what is really embarrassing.

On the contrary, I spent time completely destroying your ridiculous attempts to link the threats posed by PIRA and Hamas.

Anyone who knows their stuff about these two terrorist groups would not have made such a silly post.

If the UK was facing the level of threat Hamas poses, we absolutely would have gone in very hard militarily.

Far, far harder than we ever needed to do with PIRA who really weren't as much of a threat as Hamas are. So much so the UK could easily commit far more military resources to fighting the Argentines in the Falklands 1982 and the Iraqis 1991.

We in the UK have NOT needed to defend ourselves against ANY aggressor in a very strong handed way militarily since 1945. THAT is privilege.

The point is YOU engaged in a False Equivalence Fallacy in attempting to compare the UK's response to a PIRA comprised of very small terrorist cells of a few hundred against the Israeli response to a Hamas comprised of approximately 40,000 terrorists.

The scale of each is massively different and, therefore, not remotely comparable.

Quite frankly, I've no idea what relevance your reference to Mrs Tebbit has here, but my family and I are ourselves survivors of PIRA attempted murder. And a relative was murdered by PIRA. Not to mention it was my homeland PIRA was blowing up on a regular. I've never made any of this a secret.

Let me state very clearly that London's experience of the PIRA was not on the scale of Belfast's experience. And our experience of terrorism overall is absolutely NOT on the scale of the Israeli experience of terrorism from multiple groups.

It is ridiculous and embarrassing for people like you to attempt to correlate our experience with that in the Middle East.

The experiences ARE planets and galaxies apart!

The Northern Irish, British and Irish experience is absolutely nothing like the Israeli and Palestinian experience.

Hopefully, we'll see no more nonsense creating a false equivalence between the two completely separate AND different conflicts.

By all means critique the Israeli response to Hamas as much as you like.

But don't bother to liken it to the British response to PIRA. It's embarrassing and not very well informed.

IDF continues to bombard Rafah 'safe area' - killing 4 young children and an adult on agricultural land covered by tents

US presidential candidate suggests removal of Palestinians from Gaza

Ron DeSantis, one of the Republican party’s top presidential candidates, says he won’t oppose Israel pushing Palestinians out of their homeland, adding the displaced could go to other Arab countries.

I agree the IRA analogy is not a good one.
As for whose homeland in the Middle East is whose it depends how people read history

Well, good luck with that one...

More info here;

https://www.wionews.com/world/explained-why-arab-nations-dont-want-to-take-in-palestinian-refugees-from-gaza-648913

Another insane 'leader', like to see him and his family deported from the US. After all, they are only moving.
And he's a presidential candidate, clearly needs sane and knowledgable advisors to tell him to think before he speaks.

Going back to the original question as to why Palestinians can't leave

Egypt is the only Arab state to share a border with Gaza and it fears the destabilising effect of an exodus of Palestinians. Egypt and Jordan have both warned against Palestinians being forced off their land.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is also wary of Hamas, an Islamist armed group created by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Since Hamas took control in Gaza in 2007, Egypt has helped enforce a blockade of the enclave.
During a previous blockage in 2008 Hamas blasted holes in Egypt's border fortifications. That allowed tens of thousands of Palestinians to cross into Sinai, and prompted Egypt to build a stone and cement wall.

Egypt is also wary of insecurity in NE Sinai, where it faced an Islamist insurgency that has now largely been suppressed.

Egypt has mediated between Israel and Palestinian factions during past conflicts. But in those situations it also locked down the border, allowing aid in and medical evacuees out but preventing any large-scale movement of people.

Current situation in Rafah 'safe area'

Associated Press has some quotes from inside Rafah, from people dealing with the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike which is believed to have killed 16 people, half of them children.

Dr Talat Barhoum at Rafah’s el-Najjar Hospital confirmed the death toll from the strike in Rafah and said dozens more were wounded. Associated Press footage from the hospital showed relatives weeping over the bodies of loved ones.

“They were suffering from hunger, they were dying from hunger, and now they have also been hit,” said Mahmoud Qassim, a relative of some of those who were killed.

Many more 10s of thousands being 'evacuated' from Khan Younis southwards to Rafah and Al Muwasi

Plus this

NRWA says unable to assist Gaza beyond February if funding does not resume

The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said on Monday that it would not be able to continue operations in Gaza and across the region beyond the end of February if funding were not resumed.

Maybe everyone will have to go to Egypt to get fed and get healthcare?

@efacsen Someone else posted that if aid can't be supplied it gives Gazans refugee status, which creates international obligations. I don't really understand what this means - but presumably there's a process where the world agrees to accept a certain amount of people each.

Ethnic cleansing is working out nicely in that case.

In answer, again, to the original question - Egypt won't let them out because they tried to overturn the Egyptian government in the past and thousands of Palestinian refugees were expelled from Egypt at that time.
The real reason is not that Israel will not take them back, they fear they will have security risks if extremists enter and repeat their insurrection again in Egypt.

Black September in Jordan is another example when thousands of those so called "innocent" Palestinians were killed or expelled from Jordan after they tried to kill their king. This was because the King was due to sign a peace deal with Israel.

Israel had nothing to do with that.

Well it's both isn't it?

Israel wants rid of this human encumbrance

Egypt don't want to help them with that and don't want to take 2 million Palestinian refugees for their own security and economic reasons

Much has been made of the Palestinian exodus of 1948.
Yet during their decades of dispersal, the Palestinians have experienced no less traumatic ordeals at the hands of their Arab brothers.
As early as the mid-1950s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Libya expelled striking Palestinian workers.
In 1970, Jordan expelled some 20,000 Palestinians and demolished their camps; in 1994-95, Libya expelled tens of thousands of long-term Palestinian residents in response to the Oslo process; and after the 2003 Iraq war, some 21,000 Palestinians fled the country in response to a systematic terror and persecution campaign.
As recently as 2007, Beirut effectively displaced 31,400 Palestinian refugees when the Lebanese army destroyed the Nahr el Bared refugee camp during fighting between the militant Fatal al-Islam group and the Lebanese army.

Where was the outcry over these events? Where were the street protests in London/New York/Paris ??

It seems to me that when Arabs treat their Arab "brothers" badly the world looks on.

But when the Jews are suspected of doing the same, everyone loses their minds.

Kuwait's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was notable not only because of its exponentially large scale but because it afforded the ultimate proof of the cynical Arab manipulation of the Palestinian cause.
The Palestinian Kuwaiti community was arguably one of the most settled and economically integrated of Palestinian Arab diasporas, yet this did not prevent its uprooting in one fell swoop through no fault of its own.
As such, the Kuwait expulsion constituted the greatest setback to the "reintegration of the refugees into the normal life of the Near East," presented by successive U.N. resolutions as a crucial step toward Arab-Israeli peace.

I understand now - so Israel should be allowed to treat Palestinians badly today because other Arab nations have behaved badly in the past

Kuwait's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was notable not only because of its exponentially large scale but because it afforded the ultimate proof of the cynical Arab manipulation of the Palestinian cause.

Did they expel them from their own land and expropriate it for themselves?

So if lots of people treat a population badly it makes it all OK? Or what is your point?

If you're trying to say this is all about anti semitism, the reason people are upset at Israel isn't because they're a Jewish state it's because they are committing genocide after decades of imposing apartheid on the Palestinians. Decent people object to that.

@Lucyskywalker88

It's a form of Nakba Denial. It ignores the atrocities committed by various Israeli terrorist groups such as the Haganah, the Stern gang and the Lehi, which resulted in the deaths of many Palestinians and whose barbarity caused the British to end their mandate.

As Ben Gurion said in a diary entry:

"What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place, and casualties. If we know the family, we must strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent." Ben Gurion's Diary entry, 1 January 1948

https://dawnmena.org/denying-the-nakba-75-years-later-a-democracy-in-exile-roundtable/