Despite both accusing Israel of being behind the airstrikes on a Gaza hospital that reportedly killed about 500 deaths, Egypt and Jordan are publicly refusing to accept refugees from Palestine.
Thousands of Palestinians are presently stranded at the Rafah crossing near the Egyptian border, which is the only entrance to the besieged zone that is not under Israeli control. A large number of Palestinians have gone south of the area and are attempting to escape into Egypt as Israel’s retaliation attacks continue to batter northern Gaza.
On October 10, however, the border was shut down after it was purportedly struck three times by Israeli airplanes on the Palestinian side.
King Abdullah II of Jordan emphatically said on Tuesday that neither Egypt nor Jordan will take in an inflow of Palestinian refugees. “This is a red line … no refugees to Jordan and also no refugees to Egypt”, Abdullah told reporters in Berlin after meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “This is a situation that has to be handled within Gaza and the West Bank,” he said. “And you don’t have to carry this out on the shoulders of others.”
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi echoed similar sentiments when he explained why Palestinians cannot be admitted. “The displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt means the same displacement will take place for Palestinians from the West Bank into Jordan,” Sisi said. “Subsequently, the Palestinian state that we are talking about and that the world is talking about will become impossible to implement — because the land is there, but the people are not. Therefore, I warn of the danger of this matter.”
700,000 Palestinians are thought to have been driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 conflict that preceded Israel’s formation. The incident is known to Palestinians as the Nakba, which is Arabic for “catastrophe.” During the 1967 Middle East conflict, 300,000 additional Palestinians fled, primarily into Jordan, when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
There are currently up to 6 million refugees and their descendants, the most of whom reside in camps and settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. With many refugees establishing themselves in Western nations or Gulf Arab nations, the diaspora has grown further. Israel has rejected Palestinian requests for the repatriation of refugees as a condition of a peace agreement, claiming that doing so would endanger the Jewish majority in the nation.
According to El-Sissi, Israel and Hamas’s conflict might drag on for years. Many Palestinians, including those in Gaza, the West Bank, and east Jerusalem, fear that Israel would exploit this chance to impose long-term demographic changes and undermine Palestinian ambitions for statehood in these areas. Arab nations share this concern.
The growth of hard-right groups under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that advocate for the expulsion of Palestinians has further fueled worries in Arab nations. The language has been more aggressive, with some right-wing lawmakers calling for the IDF to destroy Gaza and expel its citizens. It remains unclear, however, whether and how much international reaction can prevent Israel from simply defeating Hamas and not reoccupying the Palestinian territories altogether.
Egypt believes that a large-scale emigration from Gaza will send Hamas or other Palestinian extremists onto its territory. That might cause unrest in Sinai, where Egypt’s military has waged a protracted war against Islamic terrorists and has previously charged Hamas of supporting them.
