Displaced

Donald Trump and his family, with the approval of the UN Security Council, hope to turn Gaza into a new investment empire built on the bodies of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children. ‘What happens in Palestine does not stay in Palestine,’ Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has said.

The international scaffolding we built after the Second World War to prevent us from doing this to one another is under attack, Tom Fletcher, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said recently at Chatham House, calling for people to ask themselves where the attacks on the UN are coming from. ‘I have a lot to be angry about in this job,’ he said. ‘A thousand dead humanitarians in three years – when did that become normal?’

The Gaza Health Ministry has confirmed more than 72,000 deaths since October 2023. A recent study in the Lancet estimates more than 75,000 violent deaths by January 2025. The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research has reached a similar conclusion, and suggests that ‘the current violent death toll likely exceeds 100,000.’ More than 780 Palestinians have been killed and 2200 injured in Gaza since the ‘ceasefire’ last October. The bombing continues. ‘The massacres happen every day,’ Bisan Owda reports from Gaza. ‘Nothing really changed.’

Most of those who have survived are not only homeless but living in environmentally hazardous conditions. At most of the sites visited by the UN, there is sewage in the surrounding streets and accumulated solid waste. More than 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations (scabies, lice, bedbugs) have been reported since the beginning of the year. On 17 April, two civilian contractors working for Unicef were killed by Israeli fire while delivering drinking water in northern Gaza.

The Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said at the beginning of March that the southern suburbs of Beirut ‘will become like Khan Younis’. What Israel did to Gaza it is now doing to Lebanon: the indiscriminate bombing of urban centres; the dropping of bunker busters and cluster munitions; the use of white phosphorous in residential areas and the destruction of crops; the land grabbing and efforts to cut off water supplies; the targeting of humanitarian aid workers, rescue workers, health workers and schools.

Only the Tibnin hospital is functioning in the south of Lebanon now, and it was itself targeted with a triple-tap attack by Israel on 16 April. Ancient villages and heritage sites have been razed to the ground: Taybeh, Bint Jbeil, Aita al-Shaab and others. Three journalists were killed in south Lebanon by Israel last month.

Last Wednesday, the reporter Amal Khalil and photojournalist Zeinab Faraj were on assignment in south Lebanon when Israeli drones struck the car in front of them. The women sought shelter in a building that was then destroyed by a direct hit. Despite continuing Israeli fire, emergency workers eventually managed to rescue Faraj from the rubble. ‘She kept hugging me,’ Faraj said from her hospital bed, her head wrapped in bandages. ‘I begged her not to sleep.’ Khalil’s body was recovered by the Red Cross the next day.

Since late February, the pattern of killing and destruction has expanded across the region. The opening salvos of the US and Israeli war on Iran at the end of February included the targeting of a primary school in Minab, killing at least 165 people, mostly girls aged between seven and twelve.

I have lived in some of the countries – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait – that have been hit by Iran’s retaliatory strikes. The office where I used to work in Bahrain took a direct strike on 1 April. I have family in Dubai and Jordan, friends and colleagues in Qatar, and their lives have been upended by this new war launched by Israel and the US.

If Western empathy is low for economically impoverished Arabs who have been uprooted by Israeli aggression and expansion, it may be even lower for Arabs of means. The sanctuary that the Gulf has provided for many Palestinians, Syrians, Yemenis, Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese and other Arabs forced out of their own countries has been largely ignored. The Gulf is one of the only places where women from conservative Arab backgrounds are able to live and work independently of their families. The idea that Gulf nationals and residents deserve sympathy, support and security has been displaced by glee at the Western influencers getting a reality check.

My friends and family in Jordan and the Gulf have been stoic in the main. One had an ‘unexploded thing’ fall and blow up in her garden with a noise ‘so so so loud’. Her daughter was in the house. All she could think of was what it must be like for those in Gaza and Lebanon. Her Palestinian father refuses to leave. He experienced the Nakba of 1948, was displaced by the 1990 Gulf War and, on retiring as a doctor at a Jerusalem hospital, was refused permission to stay by Israel in 2014. You can still order a pizza and get your nails done, another friend joked from Dubai. It isn’t Gaza, she says.

My friend Ghassan Abu Sitta is back working as a war surgeon in Beirut, where the level of critically injured men, women and children entering the hospital reminds him of Gaza in late 2023. Ambulance drivers are just as fearful, he says, and the level of killing and maiming of children is just as high. On 8 April, Israel launched a hundred airstrikes against Lebanon in ten minutes. ‘We’re seeing shrapnel injuries,’ Ghassan said, ‘blast injuries causing shrapnel in the face and in the eyes, soft tissue injuries, multiple fractures, penetrating shrapnel injuries into the abdomen and all in children. The oldest I have is sixteen, the youngest was four.’

Alex Crawford of Sky News, one of the few foreign correspondents who tried repeatedly to get into Gaza, asked Ghassan what he would say to the international community. ‘Israel has to be stopped,’ he replied.