What to Do With 400,000 Refugees

TAMING THE GAZA STRIP · First of Two Parts

By John de St. Jorre, Special to The Union

What to Do With 400,000 Refugees — The Morning Union, 25 August 1971 — The Morning Union · Springfield, Massachusetts · 25 August 1971

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Transcribed from the clipping

“A little over a week ago, at 8 o’clock in the morning, a giant bulldozer nosed its way into Jabalia camp in the Gaza Strip and methodically began to reduce to rubble houses that Palestinian refugees had lived in for almost 20 years. The operation was watched by senior Israeli army officers and protected by an unusual display of force.

The occupants of the houses had been warned beforehand but many refused to leave their homes. In order to avoid burying them alive, the Israeli soldiers went into the houses and drove them out with blows from sticks and batons. Within a few days a swath, 30 yards wide and 100 yards long, had been cut along one edge of the camp.

Fifty houses had crumbled into dust and 500 people, half of them young children, were homeless. On the Sabbath the soldiers—and the bulldozers—rested. That day I went into Jabalia.

The camp, built and looked after by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which has been responsible for feeding, housing and educating the Palestinian refugees since 1949, was in an uproar. Long lines of houses along another perimeter and down the center of the camp had been marked for demolition with red crosses.

The bulldozer, we were told, was due back the following morning to continue the work of widening roads around and through the camp to improve security, and to encourage resettlement. Thirteen of the dispossessed families had been taken for ‘resettlement’ by the army to a smaller camp called Bureij 10 miles away.

Appalled at what they found there, the refugees had returned to Gaza town. We later went to Bureij. The accommodation consisted of half a dozen tumbledown and derelict houses, most of them without roofs.

The other alternative offered by the Israeli authorities to the growing number of homeless was in the town of El Arish, six miles down the coast and outside the Gaza Strip in occupied Egypt. The nature of the accommodation and the method of getting there were, according to the refugees, not specified. The rest of the homeless squeezed in with friends and relatives.”

Context added by this archive

A reporter walks into Jabalia the day after the bulldozer and counts what it did: a swath thirty yards wide and a hundred long, fifty houses, five hundred people, half of them children. The red crosses marking the next row are in the sixth paragraph.

The word resettlement is in quotation marks in the paper’s own sentence, and the place they were resettled to had no roofs. The standing head is Taming the Gaza Strip — a word for animals and for frontiers — and the headline underneath is a logistics question: What to Do With 400,000 Refugees.

The people are the problem in the sentence, not the subject of it, and the verb belongs to whoever is deciding. Neither line says who that is.

Cite this clipping

"What to Do With 400,000 Refugees," The Morning Union, 25 August 1971, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1971-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1971-006