Gazans aren’t predestined to be eternal refugees

On September 9, 2023, less than a month before the October 7 massacre and the war that followed, violent clashes broke out between hundreds of young Gazans and security guards from a Gaza travel agency that had been granted a license to issue visas to Turkey. Several people were injured, and the company’s offices were damaged.

The Gaza branch of the Palestine Society of Tourism and Travel Agents (yes, Gaza did have a tourism and travel association) accused the travel agency of exploiting its monopoly on issuing permits to raise prices. So why did the fracas break out in the first place?

A study published by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center on migration from Gaza since the Hamas takeover in 2007 shows that some 300,000 young people have left the Strip in that time.

A report about a month before the war claimed that around 19,000 Gazans applied for a travel visa to Turkey within the space of just one week, and some 83,000 Gazans who had already applied for a visa were waiting to receive it.

Similar figures provided by human-rights organizations in Gaza were cited in the Arab press. The visa applicants seek to make it to Turkey and from there to Greece, elsewhere in Europe, and Canada.

According to reports, young people are driven to leave Gaza by a general sense of hopelessness: Hundreds of thousands of university graduates don’t have jobs; unemployment and poverty rates are increasing; the private sector is collapsing because of the destruction of enterprises and companies; the cost of living is soaring; there is insufficient social care and levels of service are low, especially in mental health and other fields.

Murderous theocracy

Life in the Gaza Strip was difficult before the war, and is even more