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America Helps Make Gaza an Open-Air Prison

(Wall Street Journal) Eugene Kontorovich - Gaza is unique among modern war zones. It hasn't produced waves of refugees leaving for neutral countries. This has been deliberate, the result of policies by Hamas and Egypt tacitly supported by the U.S. Months after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, 3.5 million Ukrainians had applied for temporary residence in countries such as Poland and Germany. The Syrian civil war produced five million refugees. The U.S. invasion of Iraq produced two million international refugees. Fleeing a war zone and seeking asylum in a neutral country is a human right enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. Yet three months after Oct. 7, fewer than 1,000 people - either foreign nationals or wounded - have been allowed by Egypt and Hamas to leave Gaza. The Biden administration's repeated professions of concern about an imaginary Israeli plan to force out Gazans has distracted from its unconscionable silence about the deadly reality that Gazans are trapped against their will in what has now become the world's largest open-air prison. By not pressuring Egypt to open its border, according to its obligations under international refugee law, the U.S. is letting Gaza become a pressure cooker of civilian suffering. Washington has no problem with Cairo putting Gazans in harm's way, accepting a tightly sealed Egypt, while he lets millions pour across America's southern border. Why would the U.S. support locking Gazans in like North Korea does? Since 1948, Arab states and the UN have refused to treat Palestinians like ordinary refugees, keeping them in a unique intergenerational limbo to provide a reservoir of resentment against Israel. The writer is a professor at George Mason University Law School and a scholar at the Kohelet Policy Forum.
2024-01-22 00:00:00
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