LONDON — Of all the grim distinctions of the yearlong war in the Gaza Strip that followed the savage Hamas attack on Israel last Oct. 7, one may stand out for its deadly singularity: Palestinian civilians there have nowhere to go. Barricaded by barbed-wire fences, tanks and soldiers, they have been effectively imprisoned for 12 months in a 141-square-mile strip of land between Egypt and Israel that has become a killing zone.

That irreducible fact, rare in even the most catastrophic wars, has magnified the death toll from Israel’s military campaign to root out the Hamas militants. It has challenged not just Israel’s avenging army, but also Arab neighbors, Western powers, aid and refugee groups and human rights defenders.

Lacking the familiar, if tragic, cycle seen in other armed struggles — civilians are violently displaced and flee across borders for refuge — the world has watched the slaughter in Gaza with a kind of helpless horror.

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More Than 41,000 Killed

More than 41,000 people have been killed, according to local health officials. While that number includes combatants, a majority were civilians, and the rate of casualties has at times outpaced even the deadliest moments in the U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria.

“It seems unbelievable that these people, who have already endured so much suffering, are unable to leave,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, a Jordanian former diplomat who served as the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights from 2014 to 2018. “The world is not a kind and generous place.”

Yet, as al-Hussein noted, it is not wholly without precedent.

From 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces besieged the city of Sarajevo, entrapping hundreds of thousands of residents and subjecting them to bombardment and sniper fire from the surrounding mountaintops. More than 5,000 civilians were killed, making Sarajevo a milestone in what al-Hussein calls a steady ratcheting-up of the lethality of armed conflicts for civilians since the 1990s.

Still, in the case of the Balkans, the world was willing to take in Bosnian refugees. The Israel-Hamas war remains, in that sense, sui generis. Its victims are not just barricaded by fences and guns; they are imprisoned by history: that of Israel, and their own. Hamas fighters massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers because of who they were. And the world has treated Palestinian refugees differently than any others because of the Palestinian struggle to carve their own state out of the land they share with the Jews.

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When the United Nations adopted a convention on the treatment of refugees in 1951, it did not apply it to the Palestinians, nor were they to be protected by the new organization, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. Instead, the U.N. created a separate ad hoc agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, known as UNRWA.

The thinking was that the Palestinian issue needed to be settled politically, through the creation of a Palestinian state, which would give the Palestinians a sanctuary like Israel became for the Jewish people after World War II.

Until then, UNRWA would care for the Palestinians and their descendants, many of whom had lost their homes in the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. At that time, about 700,000 of them fled or were expelled in a forced displacement known by Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”

As a peace deal has eluded generations of diplomats, UNRWA’s mandate keeps getting extended. It has put deep roots into the Palestinian population, becoming the de facto administration in parts of Gaza and coexisting uneasily with Hamas.

“For the Palestinians, this is par for the course,” said Stephanie Schwartz, a scholar on migration politics at the London School of Economics. “Somehow, the world has siloed the Palestinian situation from the way we treat the rest of the world’s refugees.”

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No Place to House Gaza Refugees

There are no sprawling makeshift tent cities in Israel or Egypt to house refugees from the war in Gaza, like the vast camps in Bangladesh, which shelter more than 800,000 Rohingya from Myanmar; or in Uganda, which house some 200,000 victims of wars in South Sudan and Congo.

That reflects a bitter truth about the plight of the Palestinians: Israel does not want to let them back in because that would alter the character and demography of a Jewish state. The Arab countries to which many fled in the past do not want them, either because they regard such a large group of refugees as destabilizing or because they view it as an effort by some in Israel to drive Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip.

So, while UNRWA operates large refugee camps for Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza itself, these are of little comfort to the 2.3 million people living in Gaza as the war has raged. Aid groups estimate that 90% of Palestinians in the enclave have been displaced, some multiple times, because of relocation orders issued by the Israeli military.

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Hamas militants hide among the civilian population, taking shelter in hospitals and schools. The ceaseless fighting has led to appalling conditions, with growing fears of famine and disease. The polio virus has recently appeared, with the World Health Organization warning that at least 90% of children under the age of 10 must be vaccinated to stop it from spreading.

Such conditions militate against another basic pillar of refugee policy: that people cannot be forced to go back to their homes if they face torture, persecution or other human rights abuses. In the case of children, courts have held that they cannot be returned if they risk inadequate food or medical treatment.

“If Israel can attack terrorists living among civilians and destroy their homes, where are these refugees supposed to go?” said Harold Hongju Koh, a former State Department human-rights official who is a professor at Yale Law School. “This is particularly true if polio returns in Gaza,” he said. “Where do you go when home becomes uninhabitable, not just from war, but from disease?”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Mark Landler/Samar Abu Elouf
c. 2024 The New York Times Company