Sixty-eight orphaned children and eleven caregivers plus the caregivers’ families were evacuated from an orphanage in the southern Gazan city of Rafah and taken to the West Bank on Monday, according to a statement released by the German Embassy in Tel Aviv.
The embassy described the transfer as a “temporary measure during the war, taking the children out of acute danger, not an attempt to relocate them permanently.”
According to the organization’s website, the Rafah orphanage was established in 2000. On Jan. 4, the organization received the first group of five children whose parents had been killed by the Israeli offensive. The orphanage had agreed to take in up to 55 children, to join the 70 that were already under its care. In a statement announcing their arrival, SOS said that one of the children, a three-year-old girl, was brought to the orphanage by a partner agency, who found her “alone at one of the checkpoints in Gaza.”
This is still a suspect move, but let’s not confuse things. They are going from one part of Palestine to another, not being transferred to another group entirely.
By moving them from Gaza to the West Bank they are taking them across Israeli territory and separating them from what should be their homes.
As an act of genocide, it refers to situations where children are forcibly removed from their families and indoctrinated in a foreign culture in order to erase their identity. Think for example of First Nations children in Canadian Indian residential schools or Jewish children in Russian Cantonist schools, or Uighur children confined to Chinese boarding schools.
No one is saying that’s what is happening here.
Several people are suggesting that’s what’s happening here. Not without reason.
They have lost their parents. They have them been removed from where they live to a location more easily controlled by Israel. Away from references to the culture Israel dislikes.
The question about why an orphanage is a dangerous place is the question to ask when justifications for relocation are first put forward.
Israel should ensure the location they already are is safe from their harm.