Palestinians struggling to afford their own displacement journey
Many Palestinians fleeing Gaza City due to the Israeli army offensive are facing the dual challenge of finding a safe place to go and affording the journey there.
Families must pay about $700 for transport to the south, roughly $1,000 for a tent if one is available, and about 30-40 percent commission to middlemen along the way, reports Al Jazeera’s Moath al-Kahlout.
“We’re going to Deir el-Balah but this trip costs money,” one Gaza City resident fleeing with their family told Al Jazeera.
“It costs us $700 to $800 for every trip. There are so many expenses, like tents, and we don’t even have food. Flour costs me more than $200. And we don’t have jobs, so we cannot buy food.
“We don’t know what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to take care of ourselves. We only have Allah to take care of us. If we find a place to rent, we’ll rent it, or we’ll have to live outside. We’ll stay wherever we can.”
Displaced Palestinians make their way as they flee amid an Israeli military operation, in Gaza City, on September 1
Exhausted and with no safe place to go, many Gaza City residents stay put
Israel’s attempt to completely take over Gaza City – destroying “all modes of life” and forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of people in the process – demonstrates how brazen it has become nearly two years into the war, says Abdullah Al-Arian, associate professor at Georgetown University in Qatar.
“This is what it means to be committing genocide with total impunity,” Al-Arian told Al Jazeera, adding that fewer residents are following Israel’s forced evacuation threats than in the past due to extreme exhaustion from repeated displacements and a lack of safe places to go.
“There’s nowhere safe to go. There’s been a systematic targeting of all so-called safe zones. There has been a deliberate targeting of Palestinians in their movement from place to place.
“We’re also talking about people in many cases who’ve been forced to relocate many, many times. So there’s clearly a sense not just of exhaustion, but we have to also factor in the starvation levels.”
More Israeli army vehicles advance towards Gaza
