Press Releases

For Immediate Release

Israeli restrictions on entry to Gaza and movement about the Gaza Strip are preventing news of Rafah's devastation from getting out.  On BADIL's web site, www.badil.org/Images/Gaza/Rafah/photogallery/photo 9320/real.htm, you can see for yourself the level of housing destruction.

These photos were taken during the first week of February in Rafah, Gaza along the Egyptian border.  UNRWA statistics report that almost 10,000 Palestinian refugees have lost their homes in the Rafah area alone since October 2000.

Air raids, armed incursions into refugee camps and neighborhoods, hundreds of deaths and injuries, demolition of thousands of homes and a collapsed economy in the 1967 Occupied Territories of Gaza and Web Bank show again the dire lack of protection available to Palestinian refugees.

Humanitarian aid alone cannot resolve the protection issue unless it is combined with a serious effort to find a durable solution to the Palestinian refugee issue.  Protection will be the subject of a BADIL seminar at the Al-Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies in Cairo 5-9 March, the third in a series of BADIL Expert Forums.

In addition to the new photos on BADIL's web site, see BADIL Bulletin No. 6: "Physical Protection for Refugee Populated Areas".

Photo captions: 

Rafah, February 2004 along the Egyptian border.

Manal (right), given up for lost, was found under the rubble of her family's destroyed home in Rafah.