Israel Has Severed the West Bank From Gaza. During War, It Becomes a Death Sentence
Since the '90s, Israel has been working to separate the two parts of the Palestinian territories. The fact that a temporary displacement of Gazans to the West Bank isn't being considered shows how embedded the split created by Israel is
Children sit among the rubble and scattered belongings in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on March 13, 2024.Credit: AFP
Haroun lost his mother, five of his six daughters and his son in an Israeli airstrike on their home in the city of Zawaideh in the Gaza Strip on November 1. Haroun (not his real name, like others in this story), is a 50-year-old laborer, a former officer in the Palestinian Authority's security forces.
With an official Israeli permit, he started working at a sewing factory in Israel on October 3 and moved to the West Bank immediately after the Hamas massacre. When he heard that his family members were killed, he asked to leave for an Arab country where the only survivors, his wife and his eldest daughter, were hospitalized in serious condition.
In contrast to claims by Hamas and Israel, this separation was not established after Hamas took charge of Gaza in 2006, but was implemented in the early '90s.
After two months of coordination, he received a visa for that country and reserved a flight there from Amman. But when he got to the West Bank side of the Allenby Bridge/Karameh crossing with Jordan, which is controlled by Israel, he was arrested by the Israeli police. He was sent to a military detention center in Anatot, near Jerusalem, and was scheduled to be deported to Gaza.
Ram Winograd, a judge in Jerusalem's District Court, rejected a petition by the nonprofit organization HaMoked Center for the Defense of the Individual to postpone his deportation to a location where his life would be in danger, arguing that there was no difference between him and other people in Gaza. "The difference between the danger faced by the plaintiff and the danger faced, so he claims, by all other Gazans was not clarified," wrote the judge in rejecting the request for a temporary injunction.
Khan Yunis this week.Credit: AFP
The bereaved father's arrest and the intention of preventing him from assisting his loved ones outside this country are based on emergency war regulations declared by the government on November 9. But long before that, Israel prepared the ground so that the expulsion of Palestinians born in Gaza but living or staying in the West Bank will be regarded as its birthright.
Long before the 2023 emergency regulations went into effect, Israel unlinked Gaza's population from the one in the West Bank, prohibiting freedom of movement between these two areas, even for the purposes of work or studies.
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In contrast to claims by Hamas and Israel, this separation was not established after Hamas took charge of Gaza in 2006, but was implemented in the early '90s and gradually made stricter through military ordinances and prohibitions on movement. From 1994, this constituted a blatant violation of one of the basic tenets of the Oslo Accords, by which both sides viewed Gaza and the West Bank as one territorial unit. This separation and its economic and social implications was one of the factors that weakened the Palestinian Authority and strengthened Hamas.
The extent to which this decoupling has become self-evident can be seen in the fact that Gaza civilians cannot be temporarily evacuated to the West Bank for the purpose of saving their lives. Despite the dual rival rule that has evolved in Gaza and the West Bank between Hamas and Fatah, many institutional operations are still shared.
Palestinians cross the Rachel's Tomb Crossing, last month.Credit: Mahmoud Illean/AP
For example, the Palestinian Authority issues identity cards and passports in both areas; high school students in both take the same matriculation exams; bank account numbers follow the same sequence in both; and mobile phone companies operate in both as well. Furthermore, many people in Gaza, as former and current public service employees, receive their salaries, benefits and pensions from Ramallah, slashed as they are due to Israel's withholding of funds belonging to the Palestinian Authority.
Fortunate Palestinians who have foreign citizenship or relatives living overseas were allowed to leave the Gaza Strip for those countries and save their lives during the war. Israel allowed women with Israeli citizenship or residence permits who were living with their families in Gaza to leave for Israel or East Jerusalem. Not all of these women took advantage of this option, since Israel does not allow their husbands, and occasionally their children – both young and old – to leave with them. And yet, more than 100 women saved themselves and their children in this way. But absurdly, the Palestinian West Bank is beyond the pale of any humanitarian lifesaving. (The recent evacuation of some 60 orphans from Gaza to Bethlehem, under German auspices, is the exception.)
Palestinians in Gaza are not allowed to temporarily move to a safe location 70 kilometers (43 miles) away from their homes, like Hebron or Bethlehem.
Israelis living close to the Gaza border or in the Upper Galilee moved to locations not under missile threat, going as far as Eilat or the Dead Sea. But Palestinians in Gaza are not allowed to temporarily move to a safe location 70 kilometers (43 miles) away from their homes, like Hebron or Bethlehem. This is forbidden even for elderly or ill Palestinians whose children settled in the West Bank many years ago.
Their children live in relative comfort and safety an hour and a half away by car, knowing that their loved ones are hungry for bread and thirsty for water, deprived of necessary medicine, at risk of being killed by a bomb or a shell. They cannot do what is so natural for every son and daughter: to rescue their parents and bring them over to live with them. No Palestinian or international agency has raised this possibility, knowing that Israel won't consider it seriously, or worse, because it never even occurred to them to suggest it.
Palestinians react at al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah as people mourn the death of loved ones killed during Israeli bombardment, in the central Gaza Strip, on March 6, 2024.Credit: AFP
Thus, in wartime, three categories of Gaza-born Palestinians in the West Bank live with the constant fear that they will be expelled to face bombings and hunger in the Strip. The highest number are workers who entered Israel on a permit and decided to stay in the West Bank after war broke out. According to reports, 7,000 of them were detained and imprisoned under extremely harsh conditions (two workers died while in detention) and forcibly returned to Gaza in October and November. Some of them were arrested, jailed and deported before the emergency regulations were published on November 9.
An unknown number remain in the West Bank, knowing that at any moment the army could raid the building they live in. Thirty workers from Gaza and the West Bank were arrested two weeks ago in a nighttime raid in the village of Barta'a a-Sharqiyah, near an industrial zone. West Bank residents were released but those born in Gaza were sent to the Strip, whether they wanted it or not.
Another group of workers found a place to stay near Ramallah, and started working repairing and renovating Palestinian homes. They transferred the money they made to their families in Gaza, who became increasingly dependent on this money due to the spiralling costs of food. "Within minutes, Tareq, the electrician in the group, found and solved a problem we've had with our electricity for 13 years, which no one managed to resolve," Salim said, exhibiting some typical Gazan pride.
He was born in Gaza but moved to the West Bank after the civil war between Hamas and Fatah in the summer of 2007. Two months ago, he said, the army arrested the electrician and his friends in the Palestinian village they were living in, and deported them to Gaza. Most of them no longer had homes to return to; some of them had lost family members in the airstrikes. They had great difficulties finding their surviving relatives among the hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
The second category of Gazan residents who entered Israel and the West Bank with an Israeli permit are sick people who came for treatment that was unavailable in Gaza even before the war. On November 2, the police burst into the Makassed Palestinian Hospital in East Jerusalem and arrested several patients from Gaza and those people accompanying them. Ahmed, one of the latter, managed to evade the police and reach Ramallah, where he tries to earn money by selling tissues at road intersections, sending whatever he makes to his family. Therefore all Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem had to evacuate patients from Gaza, even if their treatment was incomplete, to apartments they rented in al-Azzariyeh, a Palestinian town near Jerusalem.
A mass funeral in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip in March, 2024.Credit: Hatem Ali/AP
Gazan patients who were already being treated in Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank were spared this fate. They continue receiving the treatment they require and despite their condition, they try to send money to families in Gaza. One of these is 45-year-old Attaf, from Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp. She looked for cleaning jobs in Ramallah after undergoing a mastectomy, despite metastases in her liver. "I live on pain killers," she said, explaining how she managed to work.
Her house in the refugee camp no longer exists and her family has moved to the town of Deir al-Balah, living in an improvised tent made of nylon sheets. Her son was wounded in the leg by shrapnel, and his condition is worsening due to lack of treatment. She said their donkey, which carried them around in a cart, died of hunger. Doctors forbade Attaf from using chemical cleaning agents, and the paltry sums she received from one employer was not worth the effort, so she stopped working. She sends the donations she collects here and there to her family through a bank transfer, aware of the weekly increase in the price of a sack of flour or a bag of rice.
Like others, she is afraid of a raid and getting arrested by the army, and is worried that she won't be able to explain her condition. Even a few days of detention in harsh conditions could potentially be fatal for her.
The third category of Gaza-born Palestinians – "who are afraid to leave their homes," as Salim puts it – are those who have been living in the West Bank for several years, raising their families there. One of the ways Israel exercised demographic control since the mid-'90s, in violation of the Oslo Accords, was to forbid the Palestinian Authority from changing the home address on anyone's ID card from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel took sole control of the decision of which Gaza-born residents can change their address, how many of them can do so, and when. Anyone whose address has not been changed by Israel is deemed by the Israeli authorities as an illegal resident, even if they live in a Palestinian town. And this is how they are treated at roadblocks by every soldier.
On November 2, the police burst into the Makassed Palestinian Hospital in East Jerusalem (seen here in 2021) and arrested several patients from Gaza and those people accompanying them.Credit: Emil Salman
Yusuf, a 28-year-old doctor from Gaza, came to the West Bank in 2019 for eye surgery. He remained in Jericho during the pandemic and found work in the city's hospital, doing his specialization there. He also got engaged to a West Bank woman from the city. He was detained at a roadblock set up at the exit from Jericho.
The Palestinian Interior Ministry had actually issued him an ID card with his address in Jericho, but Israel didn't approve this change. The soldiers at the roadblock, who have access to the Israeli copy of the Palestinian population registry, saw that his address was "Gaza" and detained him. HaMoked was unable to stop his deportation in mid-November, two weeks later, after many efforts to find Yusuf, they were able to reach him. He said that he is living in constant fear, depressed and grieving over the loss of the life he had built in Jericho.
HaMoked was also unable to stop the deportation of Sirin, a 50-year-old journalist who had been living with her sisters in the Hebron area for seven years. She was caught in early February while returning home from her workplace in Ramallah. She was arrested and deported to Gaza a week later. However, HaMoked did have two successes. Its intervention stopped the deportation of a 25-year-old man who was born in Gaza but has been living in the West bank since he was a child. Israel didn't approve the address change on his ID card, and he was also stopped at a roadblock in February, but was ultimately released. Haroun, the bereaved father, was also not deported in the end, and after two weeks in the detention facility, Israel allowed him, as a "special case," to leave through the Allenby Bridge border crossing.
A Palestinian man walks past the heavily damaged building of the Islamic University in Gaza City on February 15, 2024.Credit: AFP
When Israeli and international figures talk about the "day after" the war, they fantasize about some civil Palestinian agency administering Palestinian West Bank enclaves and the Gaza enclave or the several enclaves that Israel is carving out there these days. In accordance with the spirit and tradition of the Oslo Accords, as practiced by Israel, Israel will remain in control and this hypothetical agency will have to manage all the problems associated with this control.
A physical reconstruction of Gaza and its buildings will take decades; people will need medical treatment and rehab, both physical and mental, for their entire lives. In addition to raw materials, Gaza will need engineers, doctors and architects who will work with the people who weren't killed or didn't leave Gaza, or the people who returned. Gaza will need psychologists and social workers who didn't experience the traumas of war themselves.
It's only natural that these people come from the West Bank. At the same time, the civil agency will want to ensure a horizon for Gaza's younger generation. Israel has destroyed all the universities in Gaza and many of its schools. Teachers and lecturers have been killed. Others emigrated. In order to prevent mass emigration, it's only natural that educational institutions in the West Bank become available to Gazans while the ones in Gaza are being rebuilt. All these details require uprooting the Israeli notion and practice that Gaza is a separate entity, that it's ordained by God to be one, and that its people remain disconnected from Palestinians in the West Bank.