No safe corners: The endless displacement of Palestinians
Written by Zainab Amanullah
Photo by Amjad Al Fayoumi / Norwegian Refugee Council
On October 9th, 2023, Bisan Owda was forcibly displaced from her house in Rimal, Gaza. She summarised the harrowing experience saying, “Displacement may be the hardest psychological torture in the world, in history.’”
For more than a year, the skies above Gaza have been a harbinger of the imminent doom that residents have become used to. Time and again, pamphlets are thrown from above, bearing the unsettling order of evacuation. Thousands unpeg their tents, gather their few belongings, and start walking aimlessly once again as the apartheid regime orders immediate evacuation. They walk for miles on foot, searching for solace in a city that has their home address written all over it.
According to the UN, nearly 90% of the Gazan population has been uprooted at least once since October 2023. Some have been displaced 10 times or more. Among them, nearly 1 million are women.
Evacuation is a mild term for coercively displacing an ethnic population. This uninviting routine has become an all-too-familiar ordeal for the women of Gaza. Over the past year of this monstrous genocide, they have repeatedly been forced to forsake the limited respite and sanctuary they have gathered. We see their plight daily on our phone screens — women dragging the few remains of their past lives from one designated ‘safe zone’ to another.
In August alone, an average of 12 evacuation orders were issued by the apartheid regime. Its persistent animosity and unpredictable brutality is reaching every proclaimed safe corner of Gaza. It has systematically and slowly displaced the civilian populace from one designated evacuation zone to another.
This violent cycle of displacement has profound effects on Gazan women and girls. Already grappling with the psychological trauma of being hastily and forcibly removed from the security of their homes, while mourning the loss of countless family members, they have to cope with the added burden of insecurity, lack of access to basic necessities, absence of healthcare infrastructure, hunger, disease and the crushing burden of abandoning their dreams.
For more than half a million women of reproductive age, overburdened sanitary facilities are a daily nightmare. The on-going displacement worsens the scarcity of essential period products, privacy, and clean water, compounding their daily turmoils. The UN reports that 700,000 women and girls in Gaza are struggling to manage their periods with limited or no security, privacy or necessary hygiene products. Women are resorting to using tent scraps, reusing old pads, taking period-suppression pills, and going without washing for weeks at a time. These are all part of a deliberate and cruel strategy, designed to degrade and humiliate Gazan women.
Meanwhile the impact of forced displacement on maternal health services has been catastrophic. According to the UNFA, an estimated 50,000 women are currently pregnant in Gaza, where access to safe delivery services and life-saving medicines have been cut off by continuous evacuation orders. Multiple orders issued in August disrupted 17 healthcare facilities, including five primary healthcare centers and nine medical points. The harrowing reports of C-sections being performed without anaesthesia are a grave indictment that all humanity has to repent for.
But that’s not all, for after each successive military incursion, Gaza has been transformed into a desolate ghost town. The repeated aerial and ground assaults have left in their wake a landscape stripped of life and sustenance. With no guarantee of safety and no assurance of sanctuary, compounded by the military’s history of targeting their own self-declared safe zones, thousands are forced to pack the scant remnants of their previous lives after every evacuation order.
According to UN Women, an estimated 10,000 women have been killed in Gaza to date, leaving behind 19,000 orphaned children. More than 3000 women have become widowed and are serving as the primary caretakers of their families, with their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers engulfed by the barbarity of this genocide.
Each cycle of displacement eradicates the frail support system that women have painstakingly built for themselves. This is a cruel mockery of the suffering endured by displaced civilians, who have been forced to abandon their homes and peaceful lives. It is a demeaning affront, crushing the fundamental principles of basic human decency. Implied in each act of forced displacement is a clear message demonstrating the inhuman mentality of the colonial regime: this land is not yours. We wield the power to uproot you at will, through coercive force, US-funded weaponry and the complicit silence of world leaders.
As those in power stand shamelessly silent with their hands tied by political and financial gains, their double standards uncovered and their complicity unveiled, it makes one wonder — for how long must the people of Gaza endure this? For how much longer must Palestinians be denied normalcy, herded from one place to another, seeking respite and safety?
For those who, even today, walk homeless in their own city, robbed of their peace and security, for them, every action should be taken to ensure they are not relegated to the shadows of oblivion. They must be remembered, and forever etched into the collective memory of humanity.
READ MORE