We’re being told by people who know less than you do about what’s going on in Israel that the Israeli ground assault on Gaza City is “imminent.” As Ed Morrissey pointed out yesterday at Hot Air, Israel’s mobilization “of 360,000 reservists only started four days ago, barely enough time to process the troops, let alone equip and prepare them for battle. Threats of diversions or worse from the north will likely pop into reality soon.”
So the ground assault is probably not “imminent” — or, at least, the main thrust. The IDF has been making probing attacks inside Gaza City for the last few days, preparing the battlefield for the coming assault — whenever it happens.
Despite Hamas telling Gaza residents to stay put and that the Israeli threat of a ground assault is a bluff, the roads out of Gaza are choked with people fleeing. But where are they going?
Even with the coming humanitarian catastrophe, Israel’s Arab neighbors have closed their borders, leaving the Palestinians in dire straits. They don’t want the Palestinians in their territory any more than the Israelis do. It’s going to make for a very bloody, very shocking, and very tragic forced evacuation.
Calls for a humanitarian corridor or an escape route for Palestinians from Gaza as a conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas has escalated have drawn a blunt reaction from Arab neighbours.
Egypt, the only Arab state to share a border with Gaza, and Jordan, which is next to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, have both warned against Palestinians being forced off their land.
It reflects deep Arab fears that Israel’s latest war with Hamas in Gaza could spark a new wave of permanent displacement from land where Palestinians want to build a future state.
“This is the cause of all causes, the cause of all Arabs,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Thursday. “It is important that the (Palestinian) people remain steadfast and present on their land.”
Easy for him to say. The Palestinians control few resources, have little capital to start new businesses, and are totally dependent on Israel for maintaining water, electric, and gas facilities.
And once Israel is finished with Gaza City, what will the hundreds of thousands of refugees have to go home to? Egypt and Jordan are both dead set against Palestinian refugees coming into their countries. And with Gaza City pulverized, where do these people go?
Egypt says the Rafah crossing is open and they are trying to secure the delivery of humanitarian relief into Gaza, although this has been hampered by Israeli bombardments close to the border. Cairo has also indicated that the resolution of the issue through any mass exodus of Palestinians is unacceptable.
Opposition to new displacement of Palestinians runs deep in Egypt, where a peace treaty with Israel more than four decades ago secured an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula but never led to reconciliation on a popular level.
“Egyptian public opinion would overwhelmingly see this as a prelude to ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, basically expulsion, where it would be expected then that they just never would go back,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
Israel has already decided to carry out its ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I suppose you can call it something else — “relocation of the civilian population due to military exigencies” has a nice ring to it. But recognizing the necessity of the action doesn’t make it morally acceptable. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are going to suffer for the actions of a few hundred Hamas animals.
Somehow, the scales don’t balance.
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