Middle East
What to know about Gaza refugee camps after Israeli strike
By
The Washington Post November 1, 2023
Annabelle Timsit and Leo Sands
The Washington Post November 1, 2023
Palestinians inspect the damage of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes on Jabaliya refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City on Oct. 31. (Abdul Qader Sabbah/AP)
Israel’s military has in recent days escalated its aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip, including targeted strikes on some of the enclave’s densely populated refugee camps.
Initially established in 1948 to house Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes during the Arab-Israeli War, the camps are now home to many of Gaza’s 1.7 million registered refugees, according to the United Nations. Even before the war, the camps were cramped, impoverished and lacked basic infrastructure.
On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes hit the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north. More than 100 people were killed and hundreds more injured, according to the director of a local hospital. The attack was condemned by aid organizations and diplomats. Israel’s military said the strike killed a senior Hamas commander and attributed the death of civilians to “the tragedy of war.” On Wednesday, another strike on the camp left dozens wounded, the hospital director said.
Here’s what to know about Gaza’s refugee camps.
What happened in Israel’s strike on the Jabaliya refugee camp?
Photos and videos from Tuesday’s strikes showed collapsed buildings, children being pulled out of rubble and bloodied corpses wrapped in body bags.
Al Jazeera reported that the attack killed 19 family members of Mohamed Abu al-Qumsan, one of the network’s engineers. Doctors Without Borders said many of the wounded were taken to al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, where a nurse described young children with “deep wounds and severe burns.” Other victims were taken to the Indonesian hospital nearby.
The Israel Defense Forces later confirmed that it carried out the strikes against Jabaliya as part of a “wide-scale” operation against Hamas’s network of hideouts, operatives and underground tunnels.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said Wednesday that the strikes killed a senior Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari, and “dozens” of other militants located “in an area where there are underground tunnels and operations in between civilian buildings.” The Post could not independently verify those claims.
How has the international community responded?
Tuesday’s strike was widely criticized by Arab countries, which have pushed in recent weeks for a cease-fire. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it “strongly condemns the Israeli bombing of the [Jabaliya] Camp in Gaza, which resulted in the death and injury of hundreds of innocent people.”
Bolivia’s government said Tuesday that it was severing diplomatic ties with Israel, while Chile and Colombia announced that they would recall their ambassadors. In statements announcing the moves, they did not directly refer to the strike on Jabaliya, but criticized Israel’s military operations in Gaza and what they described as Israeli violations of humanitarian law.
On Wednesday, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on X, formerly Twitter, that while Israel had the right to defend itself “in line with international humanitarian law,” he was “appalled by the high number of casualties following the bombing by Israel” of Jabaliya.
The United States, Israel’s staunchest ally, has consistently reiterated its support for Israel, while calling for it to minimize civilian casualties.
Asked about the strikes at a news briefing on Tuesday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said “Israel has the right to defend itself” but “they also have the burden and the responsibility to exercise that self-defense in a way that minimizes civilian harm.” He added that the Biden administration wouldn’t “offer commentary on every strike” or speak about an incident without having verified information on its own.
What has Israel said about its strikes on Palestinian refugee camps?
Israel has repeatedly said that it does not deliberately target civilians and is focused on attacking militants in the Gaza Strip. After previous strikes that killed civilians, including in refugee camps, the IDF has blamed Hamas fighters for hiding in populated areas.
When Al Jazeera reported that an Israeli strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp killed 12 members of the family of one of its own journalists, Wael al-Dahdouh, on Oct. 25, the IDF said it had “targeted Hamas terrorist infrastructure in the area,” without providing further details or evidence.
“The IDF does everything to avoid harming noncombatants,” Netanyahu said three days before the Jabaliya strikes. He defended Israel’s escalating aerial bombardment of the strip — which according to Gaza’s Health Ministry has claimed many thousands of civilian lives — as intended to “assist our forces in making a safer ground incursion.”
“Our fight is with Hamas, not with the people of Gaza. Hamas uses the people of Gaza as human shields by embedding itself among them in schools, mosques and hospitals,” Hagari, the IDF spokesman, said on Saturday, encouraging civilians to move away from Hamas strongholds.
Israel has urged civilians in Gaza to flee to the south for their own safety, a move criticized by the United Nations as effectively impossible in an active war zone. Many families lack the means to evacuate their homes, while others have been killed while moving south. Last week, Gaza’s Health Ministry said almost two-thirds of the casualties from Israeli strikes had occurred in the southern part of the enclave. The Washington Post could not independently verify the figure.
Why are there refugee camps in Gaza?
Refugee camps were set up in Gaza, as well as elsewhere in the region, to house Palestinians displaced by two successive conflicts: the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their land, and the 1967 war — when Israel fought a coalition of Arab armies and captured territory held by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, including the Gaza Strip.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, the body that provides humanitarian services to refugees in the camps, some 1.7 million of the more than 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees. Not all of them live in camps: UNRWA says that “two thirds of registered Palestine refugees live in and around the cities and towns” of host countries such as Jordan and Lebanon, as well as in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, often near the enclave’s eight official refugee camps.
What are conditions like at the camps?
Jabaliya is the largest of the eight official refugee camps in Gaza. The other camps, spread across the strip from north to south, are Rafah, Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah, Maghazi, Bureij, Nuseirat and Shati.
The camps, meant to be temporary, have been built up over the decades — UNRWA has described them as “hyper-congested masses of multistory buildings with narrow alleys,” and says they are “among the densest urban environments in the world.”
Before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack against Israel, “the conditions in the Gaza camps were already some of the worst across the region,” said Anne Irfan, a lecturer focused on Palestinian refugee history at University College London.
“Socioeconomic conditions have been deteriorating in the Gaza Strip for the last decade and a half,” Irfan added in an email. “This has been particularly acute in the camps, which are home to some of the most impoverished” families.
Part of the problem is that the camps were not built to last or to sustain the number of people in need today: As UNRWA points out, when it began operations in 1950, “it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.” (This number includes eligible Palestinians outside Gaza.)
Inside Gaza’s camps, most refugees do not have access to enough food and drinkable water. Sanitation is poor, and frequent blackouts compromise people’s livelihoods and access to basic services. The lack of job opportunities forces many refugees to rely on humanitarian aid to get by.
Victoria Bisset, Melanie Lidman, Timothy Bella, Kelsey Ables and Susannah George contributed to this report.