A Tent Camp for Displaced Palestinians Pops Up in Southern Gaza, Reawakening Old Traumas

FILED - 20 October 2023, Egypt, Rafah: Aid convoy trucks loaded with supplies stands in front of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Photo: Sayed Hassan/dpa
FILED - 20 October 2023, Egypt, Rafah: Aid convoy trucks loaded with supplies stands in front of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Photo: Sayed Hassan/dpa
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A Tent Camp for Displaced Palestinians Pops Up in Southern Gaza, Reawakening Old Traumas

FILED - 20 October 2023, Egypt, Rafah: Aid convoy trucks loaded with supplies stands in front of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Photo: Sayed Hassan/dpa
FILED - 20 October 2023, Egypt, Rafah: Aid convoy trucks loaded with supplies stands in front of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Photo: Sayed Hassan/dpa

When the sun rose on Friday and the autumn heat baked the rotten debris on Gaza's streets, Mohammed Elian emerged from the zipper hole of his new canvas home.
He — and hundreds of other Palestinians displaced by the latest war between Israel and Hamas — have crowded into a squalid tent camp in southern Gaza, an image that has brought back memories of their greatest trauma, The Associated Press said.
Last week after the Israeli military ordered Elian's family, along with more than 1 million other Palestinians, to evacuate the north, the smartly dressed 35-year-old graphic designer from Gaza City ended up homeless in the city of Khan Younis, with few comforts but thin mattresses, solar-powered phone chargers and whatever clothes and pots he could squeeze into his friend’s car.
With nowhere else to go, Elian, his wife and four kids landed in the sprawling tent camp that cropped up this week as United Nations shelters overflowed in Gaza, where most people are already refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation.
“We have left behind everything, and we are not even safe," Elian said from a nearby hospital where he searched for water to bring back to his kids, ages 4-10. The distant roar of airstrikes could be heard over the phone.
Scores of Palestinians have lost or fled their homes during the intense Israeli bombardment prompted by a bloody cross-border attack by Hamas militants nearly two weeks ago. The impromptu construction of the tent city in Khan Younis to help shelter them has elicited anger, disbelief and sorrow across the Arab world.
Row after row of white tents rise from the dusty parking lot. Children sit in the shade and play languidly with rocks. Men cut each other's hair. Newly acquainted neighbors wait outside to receive their shared meal from UN workers — a couple of loaves of bread and cans of tuna or beans.
“These images are something that the Arab world cannot accept,” said Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist in Jordan.
Scenes of Palestinians hastily setting up UN tents are dredging up painful memories of the mass exodus that Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe." In the months before and during the 1948 war, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from what is now Israel. Many expected to return when the war ended.
Seventy-five years later, those temporary tents in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring Arab countries have become permanent cinderblock homes.
“1948 is immediately brought to mind when Palestinians in Gaza are told to flee, it's immediately brought to mind when you see those images (of tents),” said Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. “Palestinian writers have etched this into the Arab consciousness.”
The UN Palestinian refugee agency said the camp is not permanent. It said that the agency distributed tents and blankets to dozens of displaced families in Khan Younis who couldn’t fit in other UN facilities “to protect them from the rain and provide dignity and privacy.” Gaza already is home to eight permanent camps, which over the years have turned into crowded rundown urban neighborhoods.
But regional anxiety over the Khan Younis tents and Israeli evacuation warnings has grown, adding fuel to the huge, angry protests surging in Mideast capitals over the war in Gaza that began on Oct. 7, when Hamas mounted its raid that killed 1,400 Israelis. Since then, Israel's retaliatory bombing campaign has killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. Many of the victims are women and children.
“It’s very worrisome for the government of Jordan," the journalist, Kuttab, said of the wave of displaced Palestinians. “ They don't want to see even a hint of this idea.”
Protests in the typically sedate kingdom of Jordan, home to a large population of people descended from Palestinian refugees, have rocked the capital, drawing thousands of demonstrators with an intensity unseen in years.
Elian has been so stressed about where to sleep and get food he said he hasn't had time to fret over the symbolism. He and his family tried sheltering in one of the crowded UN schools, but the conditions were “horrific,” he said — no space to sleep, no privacy. At least here he can close his tent flap.
“We are living from one moment to the next," he said. “We try not to think about what comes next — how or when we'll go home.”



What to Know about the Tensions between Iran and the US before Their Third Round of Talks

The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
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What to Know about the Tensions between Iran and the US before Their Third Round of Talks

The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)

Iran and the United States will hold talks Saturday in Oman, their third round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program.

The talks follow a first round held in Muscat, Oman, where the two sides spoke face to face. They then met again in Rome last weekend before this scheduled meeting again in Muscat.

Trump has imposed new sanctions on Iran as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign targeting the country. He has repeatedly suggested military action against Iran remained a possibility, while emphasizing he still believed a new deal could be reached by writing a letter to Iran’s 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to jumpstart these talks.

Khamenei has warned Iran would respond to any attack with an attack of its own.

Here’s what to know about the letter, Iran’s nuclear program and the tensions that have stalked relations between Tehran and Washington since the 1979 revolution.

Why did Trump write the letter? Trump dispatched the letter to Khamenei on March 5, then gave a television interview the next day in which he acknowledged sending it. He said: “I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.’”

Since returning to the White House, the president has been pushing for talks while ratcheting up sanctions and suggesting a military strike by Israel or the US could target Iranian nuclear sites.

A previous letter from Trump during his first term drew an angry retort from the supreme leader.

But Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term led to face-to-face meetings, though no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental US.

How did the first round go? Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, hosted the first round of talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The two men met face to face after indirect talks and immediately agreed to this second round in Rome.

Witkoff later made a television appearance in which he suggested 3.67% enrichment for Iran could be something the countries could agree on. But that’s exactly the terms set by the 2015 nuclear deal struck under US President Barack Obama, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew America.

Witkoff hours later issued a statement underlining something: “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.” Araghchi and Iranian officials have latched onto Witkoff’s comments in recent days as a sign that America was sending it mixed signals about the negotiations.

Yet the Rome talks ended up with the two sides agreeing to starting expert-level talks this Saturday. Analysts described that as a positive sign, though much likely remains to be agreed before reaching a tentative deal.

Why does Iran’s nuclear program worry the West? Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program is peaceful. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon. Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60%, the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so.

Under the original 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67% purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300 kilograms (661 pounds). The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s program put its stockpile at 8,294.4 kilograms (18,286 pounds) as it enriches a fraction of it to 60% purity.

US intelligence agencies assess that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Ali Larijani, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, has warned in a televised interview that his country has the capability to build nuclear weapons, but it is not pursuing it and has no problem with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections. However, he said if the US or Israel were to attack Iran over the issue, the country would have no choice but to move toward nuclear weapon development.

“If you make a mistake regarding Iran’s nuclear issue, you will force Iran to take that path, because it must defend itself,” he said.

Why are relations so bad between Iran and the US? Iran was once one of the US’s top allies in the Middle East under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who purchased American military weapons and allowed CIA technicians to run secret listening posts monitoring the neighboring Soviet Union. The CIA had fomented a 1953 coup that cemented the shah’s rule.

But in January 1979, the shah, fatally ill with cancer, fled Iran as mass demonstrations swelled against his rule. The revolution followed, led by Khomeini, and created Iran’s theocratic government.

Later that year, university students overran the US Embassy in Tehran, seeking the shah’s extradition and sparking the 444-day hostage crisis that saw diplomatic relations between Iran and the US severed. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s saw the US back Saddam Hussein. The “Tanker War” during that conflict saw the US launch a one-day assault that crippled Iran at sea, while the US later shot down an Iranian commercial airliner that the American military said it mistook for a warplane.

Iran and the US have see-sawed between enmity and grudging diplomacy in the years since, with relations peaking when Tehran made the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. But Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, sparking tensions in the Middle East that persist today.