Seraj Assi
Jacobin
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| Uma criança brinca na terra enquanto outra se deita sob a luz do sol no campo de refugiados de Rafah, em Gaza, 25 de janeiro de 1973. (UPI/Arquivo Bettmann/Getty Images) |
Israel continua atacando Rafah com ataques aéreos intensivos, já tendo matado mais de cem palestinos, a maioria deles crianças, e deslocado milhares de outros, que não têm nenhum lugar seguro para ir - exceto talvez "para a lua", para citar o chefe de política externa da União Europeia Jose Borrell.
Os massacres de domingo parecem ser apenas um prelúdio para os horrores que estão por vir, à medida que Israel se prepara agora para invadir a pequena cidade de refugiados, provocando receios crescentes de genocídio e limpeza étnica. Acreditava-se que Rafah era a última "zona segura" de Gaza, onde 1,5 milhão de palestinos, quase dois terços da população original de Gaza, estão se refugiando agora.
Rafah é uma cidade pequena e empoeirada na fronteira sul de Gaza com o Egito. Na véspera da guerra genocida de Israel em Gaza, Rafah era o lar de menos de 300 mil palestinos; no início de fevereiro, a cidade havia aumentado para cerca de 1,5 milhão de habitantes praticamente da noite para o dia. Assemelha-se agora a um campo de concentração repleto de famílias palestinas deslocadas, amontoadas em casas e tendas, a maior parte em acampamentos de tendas, alguns dos quais invadem cemitérios. Muitos estão dormindo nas ruas.
A cidade está à beira de uma calamidade humanitária. As autoridades humanitárias descreveram o campo de Rafah como uma "panela de pressão de desespero". Grupos de ajuda humanitária alertam para uma fome iminente no país, enquanto Israel continua a reter o transporte aéreo humanitário para Gaza, bloqueando até mesmo os envios de farinha. Soldados israelenses filmam-se destruindo e queimando armazéns de alimentos em Gaza para matar os palestinos de fome.
Os ataques brutais de Israel a Rafah têm, de fato, uma longa história, e uma história emocionante. Nas últimas sete décadas, Rafah tem sido o local trágico de repetidos massacres cometidos por Israel e de deslocamentos em massa.
Uma história sangrenta
Rafah foi conhecida ao longo da história como a porta sul da Palestina. Antes do bloqueio israelense, que durou anos, servia como único elo de ligação de Gaza com o mundo exterior. Após a “retirada” de Israel de Gaza em 2005 e a subsequente eleição do Hamas, a passagem de Rafah foi encerrada tanto por Israel como pelo Egito, isolando assim a Faixa de Gaza por todos os lados.
Rafah tinha menos de mil residentes durante o Mandato Britânico. Com a Nakba - o deslocamento em massa de palestinos na fundação de Israel - milhares de palestinos deslocados inundaram a pequena e remota cidade fronteiriça, triplicando a sua população durante a noite e transformando-a num grande campo de refugiados.
Mas a Nakba foi apenas o começo. Frequentemente, depois de 1948, as forças israelenses invadiam os campos de Rafah, massacrando dezenas de refugiados e demolindo as suas casas.
Em 12 de novembro de 1956, durante a primeira ocupação de Gaza por Israel, as forças israelenses invadiram os campos de refugiados em Rafah, prenderam residentes do sexo masculino e mataram pelo menos 111 pessoas a sangue frio. O derramamento de sangue, conhecido como Massacre de Rafah, foi descrito pela Cruz Vermelha como "cenas de terror".
Violência e deslocamento na guerra e na paz
Durante a guerra de 1967, as Forças de Defesa de Israel (IDF) capturaram Rafah juntamente com a Península do Sinai e a Faixa de Gaza, iniciando a segunda ocupação de Gaza por Israel, que durou décadas. A população de Rafah era de quase 55.000 habitantes, dos quais apenas 11.000 viviam na própria Rafah. Em 9 de junho, o exército israelense demoliu e explodiu cerca de 144 casas no campo de refugiados de Rafah, matando dezenas de residentes. Isto marcou o início de uma longa e constante campanha de limpeza étnica.
In summer 1971, the Israeli army under Ariel Sharon destroyed more than five hundred houses in Rafah as bulldozers plowed through the densely populated camps to create wide patrol roads for Israeli forces. These demolitions, which were part of Israel’s attempts to “thin out” the Gaza Strip, displaced nearly four thousand people from Rafah, many of whom relocated to the Sinai.
To ensure the permanent displacement of Palestinians from Rafah, Israel created the Brazil and Canada refugee camps, one south of Rafah and the other across the border in Sinai. The new camps, whose very names smacked of painful exile, were so called after the UN peacekeeping troops from the two countries who were stationed there. To receive a new home, refugees had to waive their rights of return, citizenship, and ownership, give up their property in the Rafah camp, and pay military fees.
Peace proved to be equally tragic for Rafah. In 1979, Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David peace treaty, which returned the Sinai to Egyptian control. A new Gaza-Egypt border was demarcated across the city of Rafah, so that when Israel withdrew from Sinai three years later Rafah was split into Egyptian and Gazan parts, dividing families and properties by barbed-wire barriers.
The core of the city was destroyed by Israel and Egypt to create an extended buffer zone. Many houses and orchards were razed by the new boundary, demolished and bulldozed for “security reasons.” Rafah became one of the three border crossings between Egypt and Israel. (In anticipation of refugees being displaced from Rafah, Egypt is now building a concentration camp in the eastern Sinai Desert, an “isolated security zone” that would serve as an extended buffer zone with Gaza — surrounded by walls seven meters high extending from Rafah to the Mediterranean Sea.)
Rafah nas Intifadas
During the Palestinian popular uprising known as the First Intifada, Israel carried out several massacres in the Rafah camp, turning it into a killing field. According to a Palestine Liberation Organization bulletin titled “Rafah Refugee Camp: Bastion of the Intifada,” published in 1990, “Since the Intifada erupted in December 1987, hardly a day has passed without someone in the camp being killed.”
Rafah also became the site of brutal Israeli attacks during the Second Intifada. In early 2002, Israeli tanks and bulldozers destroyed the Yasser Arafat International Airport in Rafah, Gaza’s first and only airport, which had been hailed as a symbol of Palestinian aspirations for freedom.
In May 2004, the Israeli government, led by Ariel Sharon, approved another mass demolition of homes in Rafah, earning him the nickname “the bulldozer.” Of the 2,500 Palestinian houses that were destroyed in the occupied Gaza Strip in that period, nearly two-thirds were in Rafah. The demolitions displaced 16,000 Palestinians in Gaza; a quarter of them, more than 10 percent of the population, were from Rafah.
Most of the victims were refugees who became at least twice displaced. Human rights groups observed that demolished buildings had been scrawled on in spray paint with the phrase: “Sharon passed through here.” Human Rights Watch described the Rafah camp in the wake of the demolitions as a place “littered with rubble and empty of Palestinians.”
Desde a retirada
In September 2005, Israel officially withdrew from Gaza, leaving Rafah divided: one part under the Egyptian side of the border and the other under Palestinian rule. For nearly two decades since, Palestinian refugees in Rafah have lived under a joint total blockade, with no way in or out. In reality, the so-called withdrawal, or disengagement, has only made Rafah an easy target for Israel’s endless military raids and incursions, bombing campaigns, and ground invasions.
August 2014 was the bloodiest attack to date. Embarking on its Operation Protective Edge, Israel bombarded Rafah for four days, killing over one hundred people, wounding hundreds, and displacing thousands others. Entire homes and families were wiped out, including a family of twenty-three who were slaughtered by an Israeli F-16 missile. “No one is safe; no home, no hospital, no shelter,” one survivor related.
As hospitals came under intensive bombardment, people kept dead bodies in food refrigerators. In one chilling piece of footage, a farmer in Rafah opened a refrigerator in which he had kept vegetables and fruits, revealing corpses of children and young men and women lying on top of each other — soaked in blood and bombed beyond recognition, with only a few wrapped in white burial shrouds. The death toll across the Gaza strip was at least 1,680 civilians, and over 8,500 were injured.
An Amnesty International report, “Black Friday: Carnage in Rafah,” concluded:
There is overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces committed disproportionate, or otherwise indiscriminate, attacks which killed scores of civilians in their homes, on the streets and in vehicles and injured many more. This includes repeatedly firing artillery and other imprecise explosive weapons in densely populated civilian areas during the attacks on Rafah between 1 and 4 August. In some cases, there are indications that they directly fired at and killed civilians, including people fleeing.
Israel’s massacres in Rafah over the weekend mark the latest chapter in the bloody history of the small border town, whose people have been trapped in a death pit since the Nakba, and who are now facing a new round of ethnic cleansing at Israel’s hands. As Rafah has become the most densely concentrated refugee camp on Earth thanks to Israel’s continued displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, and as the IDF gears up for invading Gaza’s last “safe zone” for civilians, the scale of the impending horror is difficult to contemplate.
Colaborador
Seraj Assi é um escritor palestino que vive em Washington, DC, e autor, mais recentemente, de My Life As An Alien (Tartarus Press).
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