Israel Matzav

Hundreds of Gazans drown while fleeing to Europe

Hundreds of Gazans have drowned over the last week while trying to flee to Europe.

According to Wednesday's daily Haaretz, the Palestinian Embassy in Greece reported that the ship that sank off the coast of Malta was carrying more than 450 passengers, most of them Gaza Palestinians. Other reports say the vessel was rammed intentionally by another ship run by rival smugglers.

The Gaza-based human rights group Adamir collected the names of more than 400 missing people. “No one knows where they are; the whole Gaza Strip is talking about it. It’s such a painful story, as if it’s not enough what happened in the last war and now another blow comes,” Adamir director Halil Abu Shamala told Haaretz, noting that most of the passengers were young people but that there were also whole families aboard.

At least 15 Palestinians drowned when another ship sank off the Egyptian coast near Alexandria on Saturday.

Abu Ahmed, who lost his son on that ship, explained to Haaretz that most of the Gazans leave through tunnels that originate in the southern Gaza town of Rafah and come out on the Egyptian side of Rafah.

One Gazan involved in such operations told Haaretz: “This trip costs between $3500 to $4000 dollars a person. It’s a relatively small tunnel; most of the big ones have been blocked by the Egyptians. People crawl dozens of meters and at the end of the tunnel on the Egyptian side of Rafah a minibus or other vehicle waits for them and takes them to Port Said.”

He added that Egyptian security officials are bribed to look the other way.

Haaretz heard testimony that the refugees board small boats, sometimes dozens per boat. Once they leave Egyptian territorial waters they switch to another boat that in most cases sails to Italy. The trip usually takes about a week.

One refugee told Haaretz that when the boat approaches the shore it issues a distress call and Italian navy and Red Cross ships pick them up. In other cases, people jump into the water with life jackets, and are rescued by the Coast Guard or the Red Cross.

Evelyn Gordon points out that 'Palestinian refugees' are the only refugees in the world who are denied the right of resettlement.

The news that hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza drowned last week when the boats in which they were trying to reach Europe sank once again highlights the hypocrisy of the world’s attitude toward the Palestinians. After all, the “international community” has designated two-thirds of all Gaza residents as bona fide refugees, even though the vast majority of them were born in Gaza and have lived there all their lives. And as bona fide refugees, they shouldn’t have had to board rickety smugglers’ boats in a desperate attempt to reach Europe; they should have been able to apply to the UN for orderly resettlement right from their refugee camps, just as thousands of other refugees do every year. But they can’t, because Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who are denied the basic right of resettlement.

Granted, they are also the only “refugees” in the world for whom refugeehood is an inheritable status that can be passed down to one’s descendants in perpetuity, generation after generation. Under the definition used by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which deals with all the world’s refugees except Palestinians, only a few thousand elderly Gazans who were personally displaced in 1948 would be considered refugees today, rather than the 1.2 million actually on UN rolls. So if the “international community” were to argue that Gazans don’t deserve a right to resettlement because they aren’t really refugees, that would be perfectly legitimate.

But it doesn’t. In fact, not only has the world adopted the unique definition of refugeehood promulgated by the Palestinians’ personal refugee agency, UNRWA, but it actively supports this definition by funding UNRWA’s ever-expanding budget to keep pace with its ever-expanding number of “refugees.” And once having accepted the claim that these born-and-bred Gazans are actually refugees from an Israel they’ve never seen, the international community is morally obligated to ensure that they enjoy the same rights as all other refugees.

Instead, Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who are denied the right of resettlement. Whereas UNHCR resettles tens of thousands of refugees every year, UNRWA hasn’t resettled a single refugee in its 65 years of existence. On the contrary, the schools it runs for Palestinian refugees indoctrinate them from kindergarten on that there is one, and only one, way for them to end their refugee status: by “returning” to the towns or villages in Israel that their ancestors fled–which most of them have never seen, and some of which no longer even exist. In short, since Israel would never voluntarily accept all five million “refugees” on UNRWA’s rolls, it’s telling them that the only solution to their refugeehood is Israel’s destruction.

But as long as there are no Jews killing the 'Palestinian refugees'... what difference does it make?

Read the whole thing. 

Labels: Gaza, Hamas, Palestinian refugees, refugee camp, UNRWA

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:13 AM