Tens of thousands of Gazans begging to go to Egypt. Palestinians outside Gaza, NGOs and national leaders say, sorry, stay put for your own good.

Khaled Hassan, a terrorism researcher, tweeted about a (now deleted) post by an Egyptian TV series that mentions how Palestinians in Gaza want to go to Egypt, and comments where Egyptians say how much they hate Palestinians. 

Amer Zahr, a Palestinian-American comedian and apparent adjunct law professor for some school he doesn't mention on his LinkedIn (University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.)  tweeted in response, "you must know that palestinians don’t want to go to egypt. it’s the israelis that want to send them to egypt."

This is a myth that Palestinians outside Gaza tell each other and the world all the time. For example, Sky News Arabia had an article in December about how Gazans prefer to live under bombardment of bombs than to flee to Egypt. 

But the Palestinians in Gaza tell a different story, one that news media has only rarely covered.

I've previously discussed the GoFundMe campaigns I had seen where many Gazans try to raise money to brible Egyptian official to allow them to take the bus through Rafah to Egypt. GoFundMe limits the number of fundraisers it lists per query to 1000, so it is not easy to figure out how many Gazans in total have turned to the crowdfunding platform to raise money to leave Gaza. But I created several queries and removed duplicates, so I can say with confidence that there are far more than 4,000 campaigns on that platform to raise money to leave Gaza, most of them representing families with four or more members. 

That means over 15,000 Gazans whose names anyone can look up. And I only looked at those that said "evacuate Gaza," "escape from Gaza" or "leave Gaza" with minor variants. (There could easily be double or triple the numbers this method uncovered, but I can only see 1,000 results for each query.) 

Most of the fundraising requests  are sponsored by friends and relatives outside of Gaza; some are probably scams, and perhaps some families have more than one sponsor. But in general the 15,000 number seems a bare minimum that probably represents far more.  

Yet people who pretend to support Palestinians deny that anyone wants to leave and they prefer that thousands of people trying to escape stay in a war zone.

Not one NGO I could find  - HRW, Amnesty, Gisha, Oxfam, UNICEF, B'tselem - has said a negative word about Egypt's and Jordan's adamant refusal to allow anyone to leave except serious medical cases. Most of those NGOs speak up for other refugees having the right to flee, even other refugees who want to go to Egypt, but not a word about Gazans.

People who claim to care about human rights are actively denying the right of Gazans to leave if they want to. And if pressed, they justify this by falsely claiming that Palestinians in Gaza don't want to leave.

This is similar to the myth that Arabs still say, claiming that Palestinians who live in Arab countries do not want to become citizens of those countries.. Of course they do - they took every chance they have had to become citizens. Most Hamas leaders have Egyptian citizenship and most Fatah leaders have Jordanian citizenship. 

Why are these refugees treated differently by NGOs from every other refugee group? Why did they support Iraqi and Somali and Sudanese and Syrian refugees, but not Palestinians?  

Because it might peripherally help Israel in its war against Hamas. When Hamas is deprived of human shields, it is also deprived of a public relations victory. And "human rights groups" don't give a damn about Jewish lives in danger from allowing Hamas to survive.

Journalists really need to ask each of these NGOs for their official position on whether Gazans who want to should have the right to escape Gaza. Because that will expose their hypocrisy - and might save thousands of lives.

(h/t Dan)

---

---

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!