Many may forget what happened during the 1948 War, when Israel expelled Palestinian residents from the territories it seized during the conflict, despite the fact that many of those areas had not been allocated to the Jewish state under the United Nations Partition Plan. Their inhabitants were driven across the borders into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, where refugee camps were established to accommodate them until arrangements could be made for their return to their homes after the war — a return that, of course, never took place.
Israel attempted to pursue the same course in Gaza, seeking to push its inhabitants across the Egyptian border in order to take possession of the territory without its people. Egypt, however, completely sealed its borders. It neither allowed Palestinians to cross into Egyptian territory nor established refugee camps for them on Egyptian soil. Had it done otherwise, Israel would have taken control of Gaza as an empty territory from that time onward, filled it with Jewish settlements, and turned its original inhabitants into refugees living in camps across Sinai, no different from those that exist to this day in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
From the outset, Egypt recognised that the displacement of Palestinians would amount to the liquidation of the Palestinian cause and make their return to the homeland virtually impossible. Land emptied of its population through expulsion, intimidation, and killing is swiftly transformed by Israel through the establishment of Jewish communities and settlements.
This is precisely what happened to the historic Palestinian cities that were subsequently Judaised, their names changed and their features transformed. Little remains of them today except the keys to old homes that Palestinians carried with them when they departed, clutching them to their chests as symbols of their ownership of both their homes and their land.
For this reason, the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s population was driven there by the actions of the Israeli occupation forces through intimidation and violence. Statistics indicate that more than 70 per cent of Gaza’s residents originally come from Haifa, Jaffa, Beersheba, Jericho, Beisan, Hebron, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus, Acre, Ashkelon, Safed, and Tiberias. Their presence in Gaza since Egypt refused their displacement in 1948 is what prevented Israel from swallowing the territory, as it did with other Palestinian lands.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 June, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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