An estimated half-million Palestinains who were temporarily displaced by the Gaza War began returning to north Gaza last Sunday as a result of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Their destination is a place of destruction – mountains and mountains of rubble and severely damaged buildings. The scenes of destruction resemble World War II.
It is hard to imagine that dystopian wilderness is where ordinary families lived and worshipped, yet their relentless march back “home” sent a clear signal that Palestinians are determined to stay on the land that to our eye hardly seems habitable.
It means the struggle for Palestine that has locked the Palestinains and Israelis in a permanent cycle of violence dating back to 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel will continue. Of that there can be little doubt.
Some 700,000 Palestinians fled and were driven from their homes by newly arrived Jewish people in the 1940s – it is commemorated as the
Nakba, the catastrophe, in Arabic.
Another 300,000 Palestinains were displaced after the 1967 war, when Israel seized yet more territory.
The Gaza war has displaced 90 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza – the new
Nakba – and they know that if they do not return they will lose their ancestral home forever.
Although Palestinians continue to claim the right to return, Israel has refused, in order to avoid a Muslim majority within Jewish borders, and Palestinians have become long-term refugees, mainly in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.
Today, about six million Palestinians are displaced, including those in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
This latest Gaza war is unprecedented for the sheer horror of it. For 15 months – since Hamas attacked Israelis in their homes and at play on October 7, 2023, murdering 1,200, wounding over 3,000 and taking 251 more hostage – we have been fed heartwrenching media pictures of death, mayhem and annihilation.
Now, as a fragile peace still holds, prisoners are being exchanged and food supplies are arriving in Gaza, we have had the spectacle of slow-moving throngs of homeless, but not hopeless civilians returning to a terrain blitzkrieged by the mighty Israeli retaliatory war effort against them.
The casualty figures are staggering – over 47,000 Palestinians killed and over 111,000 injured, 75 per cent of them unarmed women and children in schools, homes, safe havens, hospitals, mosques, anywhere and everywhere.
And while the official Gaza War raged, illegal Jewish settlers and the Israeli army waged unofficial war against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, killing another 900 of them.
Israel has been quiet about its own civilian casualties, playing down the effect of the surprise Hamas attack that threatened to unseat PM Benjamin Netanyahu from the leadership of his expedient coalition of the right and extreme religious right.
The brutality on both sides feels like it belongs in another age – the Dark Ages and late Middle Ages, when human history was near its lowest ebb. It speaks of a lack of humanity among men. But su
