Reuters published a story ahead of World Refugee Day last Friday about Palestinian “refugees” in Gaza.
It is a typical mainstream news story – meaning it is an outrageous story that makes no attempt to put any context around the anti-Israel points it wants to make.
On the United Nations’ World Refugee Day on Saturday, Marwan Kuwaik, a 70-year-old Palestinian in Gaza, will be focused on trying to eke out a living by selling snack food on the street.
In Gaza, Kuwaik earns about 30 shekels ($8.50) a day selling lupin beans from his bicycle. He is among 1.4 million Palestinians U.N.-registered refugees in the impoverished and crowded enclave, whose economy has suffered from years of Israeli and Egyptian blockades.
Because Hamas and other terror groups have used Gaza as a literal launching pad for rockets and other terror attacks. Reuters doesn’t mention this.
Kuwaik’s parents were among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were forced to leave their homes in what is now Israel during the fighting that surrounded its founding in 1948.
He was born two years later in Gaza and lives in the outskirts of its Beach refugee camp. The U.N. registers as refugees the descendants of those Palestinians displaced more than 70 years ago.
By the official UN definition of “refugee,” Kuwaik is not a refugee for two reasons: one because it doesn’t apply to descendants, and two because he still lives in “Palestine” and refugees are by definition those who are outside their country. Reuters doesn’t mention this.
“We will return,” Kuwaik vowed in his house as he filled small plastic bags with lupin beans. “If we die our sons will rise, and if they die then our grandchildren will do it.”
There are no other “refugees” from the 1940s in the world. Everyone settles someplace. But Palestinians are the only people who are considered “refugees” in perpetuity. Reuters doesn’t mention this.
Hamas controls Gaza. There is no reason for there to be any “refugee camps” in Gaza. The people should have been moved into regular housing long ago, and Israel attempted to do this in the 1980s – and the UN condemned Israel for that. Reuters doesn’t mention this.
UNRWA doesn’t try to resettle refugees or make them independent of handouts from the world. On the contrary, UNRWA’s existence is dependent on keeping the fake ”refugee” issue alive. Reuters doesn’t mention this.
When Kuwaik speaks of “return,” he is parroting a Palestinian propaganda that keeps “refugees” in misery in order to eventually destroy Israel by flooding it with Arabs. That is the entire purpose of “return” as Arabs have admitted for decades. Reuters doesn’t mention this.
For World Refugee Day, Reuters decided to use its platform to create anti-Israel propaganda with highly selective facts that conveniently are all exactly the same as the narrative that Hamas and the PLO tells the world.
Reuters can point to the story and swear there is nothing incorrect, but there is a huge difference between being not lying and being accurate. This story is not even close to accurate.