I remember when the U.S. armed forces left Afghanistan and watching the truly unbelievable scenes of people clinging onto an airplane, trying to escape. It seemed like a terrifying end to a terrifying conflict, with a terrifying aftermath as well. What was missing in the immediate aftermath news coverage, I thought, was the human aspect, while most American news outlets focused on the American angle. I remember a few stories of Afghans who helped the American military struggling to get out of the country and fearing the wrath of the Taliban. Those stories faded from view and I, like many Americans, moved on to other stories.

This week’s stories are what I was looking for. While the PBS NewsHour piece was nice context, for the most part, reading Khan’s two-article series was incredibly eye-opening. It was what I thought was happening, confirmed. My favorite stories combine public records and on-the-ground reporting, and that’s exactly what this was. I’m honestly about surprised Khan was able to get the Pentagon records, and I’m glad she supported it with in-person reporting. I think Khan summarized the first article very succinctly in the second article: the documents showed “not a series of tragic errors but a pattern of impunity.” And then the stories of the survivors only add to that claim of a “pattern of impunity.” It is a great example of combining records and on-the-ground reporting to get a complete picture and tell an otherwise untold, important, story of American military failure.

I also appreciated the podcast from The Breakfast Sisters and hearing from the migrants themselves, these being resilient women who were artists and journalists – defiant in the face of the Taliban and forced to flee when the Americans left Afghanistan. It was also nice to her about Restore Her Voice  and the women that they helped. I also enjoyed reading the PBS article about the refugees in St. Louis, and how they’ve adapted. The Migration Policy article was interesting too, but I feel like the data can only go so far – there were no interviews! Which I suppose isn’t their goal; they’re not a news organization. Perhaps combining the Migration Policy and PBS articles would have satisfied me more: reading the data, and then hearing from the people that comprise the data (though St. Louis was not one of the places that was on the top destinations map, but no matter).

These articles all unite in their mission of exposing and illuminating the humanity behind the Afghan story in relation to a context of a conflict-driven stage of U.S.-Afghanistan relations. The Azmat Khan piece is quite a stunning and bitter encapsulation of how a promise, one centered in the “extraordinary technology” of the American government, became a misguided attempt ridden with ignorance to civilians, yielding a bloody and unjustified outcome.

But what happens if the humanity is removed from this story, replaced by technology?

Khan and the Times speak to the logistical flaws of what boiled down to making sure that any expected civilian casualties must be proportional to the military advantage gained. Civilians had been collateral damage in this military system, the harm produced left unaccounted for.

This astonishing indifference to civilian presence and a lack of accountability in military action reminds me of the conversation around A.I. weaponization (technology known as lethal autonomous weapons) and its looming prevalence in the future of warfare. When the article discusses notions of confirmation bias and the ethical debate around a civilian toll as a “strategic necessity,” how does this fare in a technologically centric model where the humans aren’t making the decisions?

Some statements from the Pentagon files seemed appalling to me, how the military mistook civilians for enemy fighters nearly in 1/5 of the cases, often undercounted civilian deaths, how targets on “no-strike lists” like those in schools and hospitals were removed. Specifcally, the human decision behind this reads as morally depraved due to the lack of acknowledgement of civilian deaths. Khan says that this situation is “not a series of tragic errors but a pattern of impunity”; however, how do these decisions translate if we implement lethal autonomous weapons?

The other narrative through this week’s readings focused on the immigrant story of Afghans seeking to find their place within the U.S. and its communities. The MPI article was very helpful in painting a picture of the immigrant story of Afghans in the U.S. They explain how migration of Afghans is historically a conflict-driven one, and we see how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan fits into this pattern. However, what shocked me was the large discrepancies in English proficiency, educational attainment, and labor force participation for Afghans. I find myself asking what mechanisms explain this gap in opportunity for Afghan migrants.

The PBS News Hour article on Afghan refugee communities in Missouri had me thinking of the housing conversation that has been so rife since the intense scrutiny on Haitian migrants in Springfield, OH. St. Louis has an F in affordable housing for the most disadvantaged renters, struggling with affordable housing supply issues. This article paints the traditional bright-eyed benefits of immigrant settlement, a phenomenon that brings a vibrant touch and cultural difference. However, there seem to be these fundamental lingering issues that perpetuate an inflammatory dialogue around the influx of refugees in America and how they are negatively impacting the livelihood of American communities and their existing residents.

The scenes that we have read described the chaos and desperation that conflict brings, especially when civilians are caught in the crossfire. Images of people clinging to planes, desperate to escape, show just how urgent and dire the situation becomes when a city falls into disorder. On the other side, military personnel are making life-or-death decisions, which leads to a lot of tension between those making the calls and the civilians on the ground.

One thing that stands out is how airstrikes are sometimes talked about like a video game, where operators describe the combat zone as “poppin’” with targets. How did we get to this level of detachment, where life and death are reduced to something that seems more like a game than reality? When that kind of attitude is taken, tragic outcomes follow, like civilians and children being killed due to miscalculations or flawed intelligence. What does it say about our military systems when those calling the shots don’t feel the weight of the consequences?

Then there’s the problem of proving casualties. Families who lose loved ones in airstrikes, like those of Katbeeah, are left grieving, but there’s so much red tape involved in verifying these deaths. Sometimes, reports are rejected because there’s not enough proof, or because the information is too confusing, limiting our understanding of what really happened. What kind of system allows for such disconnect between the reality on the ground and the reports being filed? How do we move forward when we can’t even agree on the basic facts of who died and why? It almost seems like these families are forced to grieve in silence, without proper acknowledgment of their loss.

At the same time, it raises the question of how the Afghan community is coping now. What does the distribution of Afghan refugees look like, both in the U.S. and globally? What resources or support do these communities have, and are they getting the help they need to rebuild their lives? Are we seeing a true effort to embrace these refugees, or is it more about tolerating their presence? The idea that these immigrants can “revitalize” communities is promising, but does that line up with the struggles they face daily?

And then, looking at the bigger picture of military airstrikes, hidden Pentagon documents reveal repeated mistakes and failures that have cost countless civilian lives. There’s talk of “mistakes” happening, but why are these mistakes so common? Why is it that investigations into these incidents often don’t even involve talking to survivors or visiting the sites? How can we trust a system that seems to lack accountability at such a high level?

These questions highlight the gaps in understanding, from the military operators who are distanced from the real consequences of their actions, to the civilians whose lives are shattered by those decisions, and to the systems that prevent us from fully knowing the truth. How do we address these issues and bring more humanity and accountability into these situations? And what does this mean for the future of conflict and the people who are inevitably caught in its wake?

Azmat Khan’s sobering piece on US drone warfare in Afghanistan left me less with a new insight on American military conduct and more so with a greater appreciation for journalism’s role in the systems of political accountability. What she demonstrated in her piece is that journalists go beyond simply relaying the information that they discover; sometimes they have to create their own lead rather than be informed by outside sources, as she did by questioning the official line put forward by the Obama government. The way in which she conducted her research however also displayed the limitations to a ‘free press’. The lawsuits currently in place to try and obtain more military documents credibility assessments in relation to Afghanistan and the fact that the Times only received 1,311 out of 2,866 reports made me think back to the state secrets privilege legal precedent that is active in the US and the limitations it creates for journalists and the information the public receives. If these 1000 or so documents were those deemed ok to be released to the public, knowing what kind of horrific details they revealed about the state of US military conduct, what would the remaining documents, not deemed suitable for the public eye, further reveal? Of course, state secrets and the 9 exemptions to the release of FOI documents or their use in legal proceedings can have grounds in protection of national security, but at the same time, the US has pulled out of Afghanistan. It doesn’t have to worry about maintaining relations or upholding foreign governments secrecy with a non-Taliban government, as that doesn’t exist any more. I find it very hard to see what the reasoning would be behind not releasing documents related to drone warfare, or at least releasing information in a way that could protect . For example, Khan was focused on the conversations and the way drone operators evaluated locations for their viability as ISIS targets. I am sure that in many cases, other snippets of these conversations and assessments could be released without releasing other vital pieces of information that perhaps would threaten national security or relationships with foreign allies – however I will admit that what I am saying is becoming very speculative of what these documents could actually contain. My main point is that I find it worrying the extent to which the agencies journalists are aiming to critique can shield themselves – it is not uncommon for the CIA and military agencies for example to withhold documents whose release would supposedly hurt ‘national security’, when later they merely addressed internal abuses of human rights committed by these agencies that would damage their reputations. In this way, these agencies still have some power in shaping media narratives simply by withholding information. Of course, Khan did most of the work on the ground by speaking to victims and sharing the stories of the victims killed but ignored by official figures. However what made her piece so monumental was the way she directly followed the patterns of US strikes where they had made it clear in their documents that there were potentially civilians; in a way conducting a form of present archeology and narrative reversal, deconstructing their claims that would not have been possible. The larger question is how to establish greater transparency, especially when agencies have powers to reject FOI requests, which remains a political question within which journalists play an essential role, even just by highlighting how many rejections they receive or by how hard it is to get some types of documents.

I found myself floored by the Azmat Khan articles. The nut-graph wasn’t exactly a revelation–I feel like the US Army’s disregard for civilian casualties has been a well-established precedent–but the fine granularity of detail that Khan reached with each individual victim and circumstance was astounding. Each individual story had the quality of a whole news piece, and Khan gathered so many. I wonder if her compensation would have been higher if she had split the piece into even more parts…

In my experience reading war reporting, two general approaches to conveying information have developed: the “embedded” perspective and the “humanitarian” perspective. This contrast can be portrayed easily by comparing coverage of Ukraine with coverage of Gaza; one has only embedded reporting and the other has barely any. While the former typically dehumanizes the targets of war through tactical jargon and black-and-white terminology, the latter typically treats the military as a black box that drops bombs at random. I think the Khan articles were so impressive to me because she was able to tell “both sides” of strike after strike; in doing so, she was able to paint a far more damning account of these attacks than somebody who had only interviewed the victims. 

I would love to ask Khan a few questions about her approach to reporting. Namely, why was this a two part series? It felt like a lot of what was covered in the first part was covered again in the second. In fact, I found the strongest sections of the first part to be the direct comparisons between the Pentagon documents and the on-the-ground interviews. Making an effort to separate the human toll from the Pentagon’s documents seems to detract from the cognitive dissonance that makes these pieces so strong. 

Jane Ferguson’s reporting for PBS NewsHour was fun to see, since I was fortunate enough to take her class last year. It’s encouraging to see the professionalism of the end result, given the unbelievable stress of her situation. With that said, I was thrown off by some of the choices that the NewsHour made with regards to their focus. Professor Ferguson mentioned that many Afghans had issues with how the US pulled out of Afghanistan, more so than that they pulled out in the first place. That makes sense to me, but no mention was really made about why the how of the operation was so disastrous (the breaking of the SIV promise, for instance). This omission could have more to do with NewsHour wanting to make as much content as they could from the situation, but I suspect it also had to do with the goal of including the segment on Biden’s speech, which I felt was significantly less important. 

One aspect that really surprised me was the pattern of the Afghan diaspora. I assume that many of them arrived in the USA by airplane, so I don’t really get why there is such a presence in Texas. Of all the places to put these refugees in, why would the state that constantly complains about an immigrant overflow from Latin America be the choice? Perhaps they have come through the Darién Gap?

I’m curious to know the role of foreign correspondents during the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Ferguson’s comments during the interview made it seem like it was her “team” consisted of her and her cameraman alone. I’m curious to know how foreign correspondents were let in and out of Afghanistan (particularly whether they were on some of the last U.S. military flights leaving Afghanistan). I also want to know the ethical or moral obligations of foreign correspondents in relaying information about evacuation to their contacts. Ferguson’s interview seemed to allude to the fact that there were contacts who had reached out to her seeking information about whether and how they should evacuate.

I appreciated the fact that the New York Times made the reports that they obtained from the FOIA available on their website for public access. I’m wondering if there were any other major journalism pieces that came out of this collection of records.

The article from the Migration Policy Institute contextualized an interaction I had with a man from Afghanistan I met in Texas. By sheer coincidence, my Uber driver in Houston over fall break told me that he had escaped from Afghanistan in 2021. He said he worked with the U.S. military which leads me to believe that he was a translator. He also told me that he worked as an electrical engineer for 15 years before escaping to the U.S. with his four children and wife, but had to work as an Uber driver because he could not afford to go through the certification process to work as an electrical engineer in the U.S. This is in line with MPI’s statistics on labor force distribution—with Afghan immigrants disproportionately going into occupations such as “production, transportation, and material moving occupations.”

He also told me that he is responsible for much of the out-of-the-house childcare because his wife cannot drive a car or speak English. This is in line with “lower education attainment among Afghan women” that the article notes. He also told me that he sends remittances to his parents who are still in Afghanistan. This is also consistent with the MPI’s findings on remittances.

What was particularly striking to me from our short conversation was that despite his professional qualifications, he virtually has no choice but to legally be in a position where he is an independent contractor and is in a more vulnerable economic position than if he were an employee of a company. I’m curious to know how pervasive this trend of barriers to “professionalization” among Afghan immigrants in particular is and whether the U.S. military has mechanisms for allowing these immigrants a way to continue their profession once they’ve relocated.

I found several  parts of the Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes by the New York Times exciting and particularly captivating.  One part of the text that stood out to me is when it reads, “In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.” This segment immeidately caught my emotions and also reinforced an interesting theme that was obvious throughout the beginning of the piece. Many of the stories in the beginning being depicted struck my emotions early on and made me think. Specifically, the story of American forces striking a building in Ramadi, Iraq. only to realize that the “unknown heavy object” being dragged by a man was a child who ended up dying in the strike. That story grabbed my immediate attention and provided an opportunity to emphasize the seriousness of the situation. Using these examples of innocence and depicting how they are being affected severely by the consequences of war is a captivating tactic in the article. It immediately pulls on the reader’s affections especially while they go about reading the rest of the passage. I also think the emphasis on this information being top secret and explicitly found only at the Pentagon archive emphasizes the seriousness of the situation and the severity of these innocent lives lost. It also introduces the importance and significance of the article early on.

The transition in this piece is also incredibly compelling. It draws the line between how not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action and how these records clearly outline the issue through personal, first-hand events documented in these records.

“To understand how this happened, The Times did what military officials admit they have not done: analyzed the casualty assessments in the aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making, and execution.” This makes me wonder- did they not purposefully do this because they feared what they would find? Were they afraid that they would realize more innocent lives were being taken than they realized?

I felt that the New York Times article “Airstrikes Allowed America to Wage War with Minimal Risk to its Troops” took a different approach. The article explicitly reads, “Sawsan had been staying with her grandparents for a week when the whole family sat down to dinner on March 5, 2016. All told, there were 21 people around the table.” This quote emphasizes just how quickly these lives change for those affected. To go from being able to sit at the dining room table with all of your family members to suddenly being under attack and receiving several strikes is such a dramatic difference that it has such a traumatic impact.

Upon visiting The Sola Foundation’s website, I found their mission statement inspiring. I especially liked the idea of cultivating meaningful connections and conversations on a small scale, hoping to broaden to more Afghans not explicitly located in Philadelphia. “Our mission is centered on empowering and mobilizing the Afghan community in Philadelphia to cultivate a meaningful connection with the global Afghan community.” Reading about this organization before reading the Missouri piece offered an enjoyable transition . I feel like many of the stories we are reading related to immigration are detailed descriptions of suffering or outlining/bringing attention to struggles that are leaving immigrants behind others. However, these articles highlighting positives and programs being put in place were much more positive and offered a different perspective/light.

Especially in the case of reading Sidiquis’ program and her work,  I found that her efforts in helping refugees and immigrants settle safely and effectively were both impressive and inspiring. I also found the emphasis on tolerating new Americans and “embracing them, embracing who they are” important. I think this point of the argument makes it explicit just how important it is to avoid having these immigrants shape shift and dissociate from their culture and where they are coming from. A follow-up quotation emphasizing that ‘Immigrants and refugees revitalize every community that they resettle because they bring something different” was also interesting.This quote emphasizes the importance of keeping the individual and embracing them for who they are, given that, as this quote explains, each individual has contributions that can be beneficial.

Azmat Khan’s two-part series is truly illuminating. It highlights the chasm between what governments promise, especially about protecting civilian life in war, and the actual delivery of their mandates. It shows that unless there is a public pressure to do so, there is no incentive to preserve civilian life. There will be no accountability, given that investigations into violations are usually conducted by the groups that commit the attacks in the first place. It also led me to a broader reflection on the false promises of technology versus the reality of how it is changing our world. As former Pentagon adviser Lawrence Lewis put it, “we don’t use [these technological capabilities] to bring down risk for civilians. We just use them so we can make attacks that maybe we couldn’t do before”. That is the paradox of technological progress. When we think it will make us more effective at the things we already do, it encourages behaviors that do exactly the opposite. They “create greater legal and moral space for greater risk.”

So the responsibility of determining whether certain actions are the result of real mistakes or deliberate negligence, especially in a war where the victims of military action are often reduced to collateral damage, falls upon the public. When the public does not have access to proper information, we become unable to perform this role. This is something that institutions of power perfectly understand and the reason why they take measures to limit the information that is publicly available.

There are clear parallels with what Azmat Khan reported on and what we see in the Middle East with respect to a disregard for civilian life in the pursuit of military objectives. Israel has reportedly deliberately obstructed journalists’ reporting, censored and even killed those covering the war in Gaza (see sources below). This is why investigative journalism is extremely important, especially in these contexts, because it provides the public with the information it needs to play its part in holding institutions of power to account for their actions. When journalists are prevented from doing their jobs, all of society suffers.

I also enjoyed reading the articles about the integration of Afghan refugees in Missouri or about the Bowling sisters. These wonderful stories shine a light on the agency, innovation, and resilience of the people we usually talk and write about, placing them at the center of their own stories rather than keeping them as objects of our own curiosity.

Finally, I once again found it interesting that the vast majority of Afghan refugees live in neighboring countries – namely Iran (3.4 million) and Pakistan (1.9 million). These statistics remind us that other countries also play a vital role in the distribution of global refugees, oftentimes to a larger extent than places like Europe and North America, yet they seldom sensationalize this issue. That is why I am particularly interested in exploring how the global south handles refugee resettlement and migration in general as I believe there is a lot we can learn from observing these overlooked contexts.

Sources
https://theconversation.com/how-israel-continues-to-censor-journalists-covering-the-war-in-gaza-228241
https://rsf.org/en/pressure-intimidation-and-censorship-israeli-journalists-have-faced-growing-repression-past-year
https://rsf.org/en/one-year-gaza-how-israel-orchestrated-media-blackout-region-war

I remember following the sudden collapse of the Afghan National Government and Army in the midst of the US withdrawal very closely on Twitter. The mood was somewhat apocalyptic and the image of people trying to clasp onto US military cargo planes is my jarring abiding memory of that moment. Jane Ferguson’s piece on PBS was very good I thought. The collage of footage is incredible and conveys the sheer desperation of so many people. I also thought it did a good job of contextualizing Biden’s speech in terms of Vietnam and refuting his claim that this was nothing like that in such devastating terms. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be a western journalist in Kabul then. There were still some ANA forces who had not disappeared, there were the Taliban of course, as well as ISIS-K, and a great number of desperate people. I also remember the takeover of the Taliban as this great unknown: would the violent reprisals start right away or would they wait until the last US forces had departed? I read Jane Ferguson’s piece in the New Yorker reflecting on that moment and her dilemma about going to cover it and risking getting trapped or worse. 

I found the NYT two part piece fascinating. I can’t imagine how much labor over so many years went into producing it: the result, however, is a systematic deconstruction of the Pentagon’s air strike assessment criteria and the bureaucracy that surrounds it. The story is that the US government was negligently killing thousands of civilians without any accountability while maintaining a narrative that it was minimising civilian casualties. The series also did a great job of bridging the gap between the very technical and data-driven aggregated review of casualty assessments and telling the human stories of the people whose families were killed in the airstrikes. Both parts are necessary to dismantle the Pentagon’s own sanitary narrative of surgical, “precision” bombing campaign. When surviving members of families devastated by the airstrikes address the pentagon, crying out how such a powerful military could have thought that their house was habouring terrorists, Captain Urban’s rigid and corporate responses ring very hollow. But if the investigation had not been so thorough, I as a reader naively would have trusted Captain Urban’s statements because I wanted to—I wanted to believe that the US military wouldn’t have done this and some civilian casualties are inevitable. This piece is so effective therefore that is manages to make you reevaluate what you take for granted. There are also so many small, but devastating details: the woman from the US overseas development agency who said the children probably lived in the house but who was dismissed, or the disillusioned, anonymous US officer who could not distinguish the result of the US’ bureaucratic bombing of Raqqa from Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo. I’m very curious to know how one would cultivate sources in government or the military especially as the source has a strong incentive not to say anything and even if they wanted to how would you find them?

CAIRO, EGYPT; Nearly a year on from the start of Israel’s large-scale bombing campaign, an estimated 100,000 Gazans have fled to Cairo. With the only escape being through the Southern Rafah crossing, Egyptian couriers have been accused of profiting from the excessive “coordination fees” needed to cross the border.

Once in Egypt however, the absence of a UN refugee body that works with Palestinians, as well as Egypt’s reluctance to give Palestinians residency or refugee status has left most in a state of uncertainty. Despite being the lucky few to have escaped the worst in Gaza, their current lack of access to employment, education and other essential services has left many with little hope for building a future.

Khaled Alghorani left Gaza for Egypt six months ago. “We are here with no residency permit or anything like that,” he says. “ We can’t access anything. Without residency, we can’t work; we can only open small businesses, but even that is very hard to get permission for. The only way right now is to either invest a huge amount of money ( approximately more 150-200k USD ) or buy a large amount of assets, so its hard for most of us.” Khaled studied Medicine at Al-Azhar University but has been unable to resume his studies or find employment, a position that many Gazans in Cairo find themselves in.

Establishing themselves as refugees or obtaining residency is not an easy task for those coming from the Palestinian territories. Egypt hosts over 756,000 refugees, with the UNHCR being the agency tasked with registering asylum seekers and facilitating refugees’ access to health and education services. Palestinians however, are the only group who fall outside of the UNHCR’s remit, leaving them unable to go through traditional regularization routes.

“When Palestinians come to the UNHCR, they’re essentially told to fuck off,” said Sara White, a former UNHCR legal officer based in Cairo. “In theory, the UNRWA would deal with them, but Egypt doesn’t want them there for political reasons”. UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was set up by the UN in 1949 specifically to deal with displaced Palestinians. Despite operating in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, it does not operate in Egypt, and the Egyptian government has made it clear that it would not allow it or similar agencies to operate on its territory, citing security reasons as well as claims that it would aid in the permanent resettlement of Palestinians, thus harming their prospects of returning to Palestine.

“There is a deep history regarding the UN agencies that take responsibility for Palestinian refugees,” says Dawn Chatty, Oxford University professor of anthropology to the Guardian. “The Egyptian government is not going to give them asylum,” she says. “Granting official asylum to people fleeing Gaza could “destroy” their notional right to return to these lands and could put Egypt “in big trouble with other Arab states.”

Egypt has long refused to recognize Palestinians’ right to asylum. Instead, Palestinian refugees in Egypt are instead classified as “our guests” or “our siblings”, for fears of creating these legal and material conditions that may encourage Palestinians to remain.

In practice however, with neither UNRWA nor UNHCR aid available, Gazans in Egypt have been left dependent on local and grassroots initiatives for support, many set up by Palestinians themselves. Many other groups are formed through Facebook, with Egyptians creating fundraisers and offering advice, for example in finding accommodation or informal work opportunities.

The issues within the current system don’t stop at the legal discrepancies, as some have pointed out. The inequalities begin from the start of the journey, as reports have exposed Hala Consulting and Tourism Services, the sole agent with a monopoly over Gaza crossings, for the extortionate fees it charges for each passage.

Officially, only foreign nationals and injured Palestinians were allowed to evacuate. As the war went on, however, Gazans were able to buy their way out through the Egyptian agency, which has been linked to the Egyptian security establishment. The prices, which before the war were set at around $300 per passage per person, have increased to around $5000 for adults and $2500 for children. Many have resorted to online crowdfunding as a way to pay the fees, as well as help from any relatives they may have abroad. The fees are then paid to a travel agency, who take a cut and send the remaining amount to Egyptian officials who coordinate the crossing.

Legal experts argue that Egypt must accept refugees. In an op-ed for Foreign Policy Magazine, Alice Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture argued that “Egypt’s decision to seal its border with Gaza violates international humanitarian law and international refugee law.” She added that “Under the 1951 Convention, responsibility transfers to UNHCR outside the areas UNRWA doesn’t serve. In other words, UNHCR is required to support Palestinian refugees who reach Egypt. International cooperation is a foundational principle and that all states must play their part.” But without an active effort by the Egyptian government to classify Palestinians as ‘refugees’, this obligation remains unfulfilled, leaving Gazans in a precarious state.

Egyptians however, despite being vocal in support of the Palestinian cause, are wary of treating Palestinians in the same way as other refugees, arguing that efforts should be focused on ending the war, rather than pressuring Egypt to open its borders.

“If everyone leaves, there will be no more Gaza,” says Youssef Ali, a Princeton student from Cairo. “The only reason we call it Palestine or Gaza is because people still live there and assert it as such. People from Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia.. they all have a country to return to once the conflict ends. In the case of Palestine, they would never be able to return, as Israel would simply take the land, build homes, and that would be the end of it. Palestine, as we know it, would cease to exist, and a cause that has persisted for more than seven decades would disappear. This is why we don’t want to accept all Gazans.”

History has shown Egypt the long-term perils of supporting Palestinian migration out of the territories. The situation of Gazans in Cairo has demonstrated the political dilemma Egyptians claim they face, of needing to preserve the Palestinian right of return whilst providing Gazans with the immediate legal and humanitarian aid they need. However, without mechanisms to integrate and aid Palestinians as refugees, Gazans will continue to suffer in the absence of both the UNHCR and UNRWA.