Alfonso Bianchi October 10, 2023
The Palestinian people are scattered throughout the Middle East and around the world, scattered across the globe in what is known as a true diaspora, not very dissimilar to what Jews have experienced throughout history. In total, around 5.3 million people live in the Palestinian territories. Two million and 375,000 live in the tiny Gaza Strip, an area of 365 square kilometers that, with 6,507 people per square kilometer, is one of the most densely populated in the world.
This is the area under the control of the Hamas militias and from which the attack began on Saturday, which left more than 700 Israelis dead, including soldiers and civilians, and triggered a war with Israel that only broke out in is in its final phase and has already caused the deaths of over 400 Palestinians, a number that will rise dramatically in the coming hours and days. The Gaza Strip has been under a strict blockade since 2007 by Israel, which controls (or at least controls) everyone entering or leaving, as well as any kind of trade.
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Another nearly three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, an area under the control of the Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized authority led by Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the secular al-Fatah and heir to historic Palestinian leader Arafat. However, this part of Palestine is actually occupied, as it is home to various Israeli military bases and the Tel Aviv military controls the region, where there are 175 permanent checkpoints and other improvised roadblocks.
There are also 144 illegal colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, home to around 450,000 Israelis, many of them Orthodox Jews. Apparently many Palestinians also live in Israel itself; there are over two million Arab Israelis, representing 21% of the population and the largest ethnic minority. Around 280,000 Palestinians live between East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the areas Israel occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War.
These are truly second-class Israeli citizens because even though they actually live in the Jewish state, they do not have the right to vote in the country because Tel Aviv does not consider them citizens of the country. For this reason, organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have openly defined Israeli policies as apartheid. Israel has near-absolute control over the lives of Palestinians, tens of thousands of them are at risk of forced evictions, according to AI, and Israeli authorities have demolished 952 Palestinian buildings across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in recent years and evicted 1,031 people. After years of conflict and Israel’s expansion into areas once inhabited by Arabs, Palestinians are then scattered across the region and the world.
There are so many refugees that the United Nations has created a specialized agency to help them: UNRWA, the United Nations agency for the assistance and employment of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. When the agency began operations in 1950, it looked after around 750,000 refugees. Today around 5.9 million people rely on their services. According to UNRWA data, almost a third of these refugees, more than 1.5 million people, live in 58 refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Overall, estimates suggest that almost 50% of Palestinians live outside Palestine. Of these, 5.59 million are in Arab countries (44% of the total) and about 700,000 (5.5%) in the rest of the world.
Most Palestinians outside Palestine are refugees who were exiled during the so-called Nakba (Catastrophe in Arabic), the expulsion of Palestinians and the expropriation of their property during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Already in December of the same year, the General Assembly of the United Nations convened for the return of these persons, the return of their property or, alternatively, the obtaining of compensation (Decision 194). Since then, this application has only been on paper.
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