THE ROOMS OF the Arish Hospital, just a short distance from the Egyptian border with Gaza, are full of injured Palestinians.
There’s a toddler on an oxygen mask, in need of a lung transplant after the impact of an Israeli bombing raid. Nearby a woman recovers from a leg amputation. A five-year-old boy sits with bandaged limbs clutching a toy.
There are other patients here – young and old, men and women, girls and boys. All were injured in Israeli bombing raids of cities inside Gaza.
A short distance away by road refugees wait in 40 degree heat to try and cross the border – not to seek refuge in other countries but to go back to their homes inside Gaza.
Many of them have been stuck in a bureaucratic purgatory at the border – suffering an impossible situation of days, weeks, months of a wait to be let back.
The Journal travelled this week with Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin on a visit to the Rafah Border crossing and to diplomatic meetings in Egypt and Jordan.
We also visited a refugee camp at Talbieh, some 50 kilometres from the Jordanian capital of Amman.
Despite stories of the danger and the deaths of loved ones, Palestinians who spoke to us at the various locations all said they wanted to go home.
The refugees not the only people waiting to cross the border to Gaza. Parked along the dusty desert highway leading to the Rafah Gate are hundreds of articulated lorries – some from aid agencies, others with the normal supplies of life.
They are waiting to be cleared to enter but it is a certainty that much of the produce will spoil. The queue is four kilometres in length. Security is tight. Heavily-armed Egyptian soldiers are tense – it is understandable, they daily hear the ordnance blasts of shelling a few kilometres away.
At the gate to the crossing local plainclothes intelligence agents monitor who is coming and going. We are stopped by those officers and allowed no further – the city of Rafah and Gaza is just 200 metres away.
From behind a high blast wall the refugees emerge, women, men and children – all with a story to tell of lengthy delays waiting for the moment when they can go home.
The Egyptian Sinai Desert, with its sand dunes and occasional brush, has been sealed as a military zone and it is impossible to move through without Egyptian Government clearance.
All those we speak to are from Khan Younis – a city in the south of the Gaza Strip which has been devastated by Israel.
They all speak passionately and emotionally about wanting to get back into Gaza. One of those is Haneen, a young woman from Khan Younis who has been stuck with her family at the border for days.
“We’ve been waiting for almost a week – coming and going for four days now and there is not anything happening. I want to go back to my home, to Gaza, I would love to go back,” she said.
Her city has been devastated by bombing and she understands that what she is going back to is total destruction and a home in rubble.
“Khan Younis is not a city anymore, it is a home for ghosts. There is not a single house standing and if it is still standing there are only pillars for the walls. Everything is destroyed, we lost everything.
“All kinds of life are destroyed. I would tell people that this needs to stop right now, not tomorrow, not in the future, right now we need to have our lives back,” she said.
There are others here too. Khan Younis resident Leon, with his grandson on his shoulders, has been at the border waiting to cross back for five days. He said that they are receiving texts telling them to go to the border to cross but he now believes that it is a daily “fake message”.
He said there are at least 100 people he knows personally who are waiting to get back in but they are being told by authorities that he and others like him need to travel to the West Bank and receive documents from Palestinian authorities in Ramallah.
“It is impossible, how do I go to Ramallah – the embassy tell us to come here everyday and the Egyptian police tell us there is no way through,” he said.
All of the refugees said they have family members left behind. One man said that he has lost more than 100 members of his family.
Patients receiving treatment in the nearby hospital are also coming back to the border seeking to go home. A woman, Adla Mohammed, 65, approached us as we spoke to other people – crying and begging us to help her get back into Gaza.
Amar Mawdi, from Khan Younis, said: “I want to go and see my home, I want to see it. I want to go to Gaza.” That was the message everyone there wanted to say – their sole driving force was to go back.
We travelled back towards Al Arish and visited an Egyptian Red Crescent logistics hub where aid is collected and processed. Manager Lotfy Gheith and his team demonstrated the process. Then he led us from a warehouse to a large tent where he showed us the supplies that the Israelis have refused access.
There were CT Scanners for hospitals, medical kits, water purifiers, kitchen sets, water bladders, oxygen tanks, incubators for babies, solar panel lanterns, stretchers for ambulances, toilets – all, he said, refused entry by Israeli officials.
“Anything for hospitals, any medical aid, it is rejected,” he said.
He also spoke of chocolate croissants and fruit juice being refused and said the Israelis told them it was because they were luxury items.
As night fell across the desert and as his visit to Rafah concluded a visibly angry Micheál Martin said this was a punitive “deliberate act of control”.
“The only reason they are doing this is to demonstrate to the population at large who is in charge. I am coming to the conclusion on this visit that this isn’t just a war with Hamas it is a war against the population of Gaza.
“They are being punished collectively – I cannot rationalise any other conclusion.”
The Tánaiste said that humanitarian workers have said that violence specifically targeting women is rising inside Gaza and being used as a weapon of war.
“This is inhumanity on a grand scale and needs to stop.”
There was a chink of light the next day after the chaotic, near hopelessness of the scenes at the Rafah crossing. In Talbieh Refugee Camp, some 35kms south of the Jordanian capital of Amman, we observed the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
UNRWA has suffered extensively as the Israeli Government claimed it was a front for Hamas activities in Gaza. An independent review group headed by a French former minister found no “neutrality-related issues” but noted Israel had yet to provide evidence for its claims.
Talbieh was established in 1968 for Palestinian refugees fleeing the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It is now home to more than 10,000 refugees, all cared for by UNRWA. Rather than being a tented city it resembles a city block of tight laneways with multi-storey concrete buildings.
The people we spoke in those streets and facilities told us they were Palestinian refugees but most of them were not born in Palestine – many were born in the camp.
There are clothes and food shops, a medical centre and well-funded schools. Kids play in the street. The only sign that there may be potential for trouble is the stencil of an AK47 on the wall stating that firearms are prohibited.
In a classroom of the girls’ school a teacher asks the students what they want to be when they grow up. The girls, who have a computer on each table, answer rapidly: a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, a policewoman. They all speak English and are full of dreams and hope for the future.
Despite all of them being born in the camp in Jordan they all strongly say they are Palestinians. Six of the girls sit down and speak of their lives in the camp – when asked will they return to Palestine they all instantly react with a “yes”.
Farah Hisham Kassab (12) said: “We like to go back to Palestine, it is our land.”
The theme runs through all meetings with Palestinians, young and old. It is a culture based on the hope to go back home.
Back in Amman, and at a press conference with Micheál Martin the Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi repeats in hushed tones the warning we’ve all heard – all intelligence leads them to believe that Rafah will be attacked by Israel in the coming weeks.
Both politicians say they believe that such an attack will be catastrophic and plunge the region into a much deeper crisis.
Officials based in Egypt and Jordan and diplomatic sources we spoke to all made clear the risk is monstrous. The security briefings they recieve tell them that Jordan and Egypt will send their military into higher readiness in response to any fresh attacks on Rafah.
Some analysts we spoke to believe there is a profound risk that the 1.2 million Palestinians displaced from their homes and sheltering on the Gazan side of Rafah will see a break for the nearby border as their only hope of survival.
Hopes of a return home for those who have already been forced to flee will become still more remote.
*****
Need more information on what is happening in Israel and Gaza? Check out our new FactCheck Knowledge Bank for essential reads and guides to navigating the news online.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say