KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza (Reuters) – “We are staying here and dying here.”
With these words, Rashad Mansour rejected President Donald Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over Gaza and create a “Riviera of the Middle East” after resettling Palestinians elsewhere.
The Palestinian man, born in 1946, was only a toddler when he was displaced with his family to Gaza during the “Nakba”, or catastrophe, along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who were expelled or fled their homeland around the time of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
He will not leave his homeland again, he said.
“We want to stay in our land and our home country,” he said. “We reject all these calls for us to leave and become displaced.”
Trump, clarifying his earlier remarks, said on Thursday he expected Israel to hand over the Gaza Strip to the United States after fighting there is finished and the population already resettled to new homes elsewhere. Israel ordered its military on Thursday to prepare for the “voluntary departure” of Gaza residents.
The forcible displacement of a population from land under military occupation is a war crime banned by the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
Like most of Gaza’s population, descendants of refugees from towns and villages that are now in Israel, Mansour still dreams of returning to his family’s home, in his case Bayt Daras, a Palestinian village north of Gaza that no longer exists.
“The country from which I was displaced, I will return to it and rest assured,” he said. Of the Israelis who now live there: “This is not their land. This is our land. We lived our whole lives, our fathers and grandfathers.”
During the new war that has destroyed most of Gaza, Mansour was again displaced, this time from his house in Gaza’s main southern city Khan Younis to Rafah, with his son, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren. With a ceasefire in place, they have returned to Khan Younis.
For a man whose life spans the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this was by far the worst war he has seen, he said.
“It takes whoever it takes, no matter young or old, good or bad. It’s a fierce war,” he says.
(Reporting by Hatem Khaled, Bassam Masoud and Mariam Rizk; Writing by Clauda Tanios; Editing by Peter Graff)
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