The price for escaping Gaza has recently dropped. It was a whopping $10,000 per person, but has gone down – first to $7,000 – and now it hangs at about $5,000. This ‘coordination fee‘ per person, to move from Gaza into Egypt via the Rafah Crossing is still way beyond what most Palestinians inside Gaza can pay. Frankly, those with direct access to this kind of money have already fled the Strip.
You have to wonder at the insanity of our world; there are new evidenced reports – and images – of children starving to death, and dying of thirst, in Gaza. Eighty five percent of the entire population (which is 2.3 million women, men and children) have been displaced by this carnage. This is a clinical way of saying that 1.9 million Palestinians in Gaza have lost their own homes and are sleeping in massively overcrowded shared houses, or tented displacement camps hastily thrown up in the last three months, mainly across southern Gaza.
Displacement camps are dangerous places; families are tightly packed and bombing can kill and maim dozens of individuals at one time. Rafah- a city I know well, that used to hold round a quarter of a million people – is now so cramped social norms are breaking down as Palestinians literally fight to survive. Homes built to house twenty five or thirty members of an extended family now hold up to one hundred and fifty people.
These figures matter, because they expose the systematic nature of the Israeli Government campaign to destroy not only Hamas, but Gaza itself, politically, socially and culturally. The words of Gazan journalist Motaz Azaiza echo though my mind, “To be clear” he said, “this is not a war against Hamas: this is and has always been a war against the Palestinian people.”
Motaz recently left Gaza, heartbroken by the lack of impact of his on-the-ground reports that exposed the daily atrocities against his people; the discriminate bombings, the destruction of life-saving medical and water facilities, the thousands of children being killed and maimed and traumatised beyond repair.
If you look at online fundraising platforms, you will see many new appeals to raise thousands of US dollars, often tens of thousands of dollars, for Palestinians to pay for their families to escape Gaza via Rafah. Before this war I used the Rafah crossing several times, to move into and out of Gaza. I know the complexity of the coordination, the tensions at the Rafah border, and the huge corrupt sums that have been exchanged for years for the right to cross. There is always someone stepping in to make profit from the horrifics of war and it has now reached industrial levels.
These coordination fees are the worst kind of corruption – downpayments on Palestinians’ lives. And yet I’ve contributed to several evacuation funds; because these are my friends and I don’t want them and their families to die when the Israeli military smashes its way into Rafah and its tanks flatten the city and peoples’ homes collapse on them and bury them in the rubble of the only shelters they have left. People in Rafah are against the all, they have nowhere else to flee. This is one of the appeals I am currently supporting – donate if you can (thank you) and please share it.
This is what we are witnessing- Palestinians trying to bribe their ways out of a terrifying conflict where civilians are being systematically targeted – whilst the world, or rather our world leaders, watch. In the case of the US, President Biden continues to supply Israel with multiple lethal weapons; the US has just approved a $2.5 billion weapons ‘package‘ for the Israeli military, green-lighting the invasion of Rafah and the huge death toll that awaits.
With this narrative of political hyprocrisy, it is no wonder Biden and his allies have lost what little political leverage they had with Netanyahu. They have failed to call out the Israeli government’s killing frenzy, failed to lean on Israel to identify its post-war strategy, and to allow aid to reach Palestinians who are starving as a direct result of this military campaign, as the US State Department acknowledged yeterday (29th March). The other terrible thing about this political myopia is that it will not protect Israel, but rather render this fragile state more vulnerable to future attacks in retaliation for this horrific masse loss of lives.
The US could refuse to send these weapons, they have a baragining chip in the transport planes that fly in weapons to Israel. It might not be palatable to talk of bargaining chips amidst a death toll of more than thirty two thousand Gazans, but this is where we are thanks to Netanyahu’s messianic fervour, Hamas’s bloodbath and the utter incompetence of the Biden administration that may also well cost him the coming presidential election. The US is effectively toothless, resorting to reinforcing Israel’s military death machine. While Palestinians begin to starve to death and die of thirst whilst imprisoned inside Gaza.
Image credit: Gaza photographer Hosny Salah
