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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
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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.”

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Fear Stalks Tehran as Israel Bombards, Shelters Fill Up and Communicating Grows Harder

Shops remain shuttered Tehran's historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP)
Shops remain shuttered Tehran's historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP)
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Fear Stalks Tehran as Israel Bombards, Shelters Fill Up and Communicating Grows Harder

Shops remain shuttered Tehran's historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP)
Shops remain shuttered Tehran's historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP)

The streets of Tehran are empty, businesses closed, communications patchy at best. With no bona fide bomb shelters open to the public, panicked masses spend restless nights on the floors of metro stations as strikes boom overhead.

This is Iran’s capital city, just under a week into a fierce Israeli blitz to destroy the country's nuclear program and its military capabilities. After knocking out much of Iran's air defense system, Israel says its warplanes have free rein over the city's skies. US President Donald Trump on Monday told Tehran's roughly 10 million residents to evacuate “immediately.”

Thousands have fled, spending hours in gridlock as they head toward the suburbs, the Caspian Sea, or even Armenia or Türkiye. But others — those elderly and infirm — are stuck in high-rise apartment buildings. Their relatives fret: what to do?

Israeli strikes on Iran have killed at least 585 people and wounded over 1,300, a human rights group says. State media, also a target of bombardment, have stopped reporting on the attacks, leaving Iranians in the dark. There are few visible signs of state authority: Police appear largely undercover, air raid sirens are unreliable, and there’s scant information on what to do in case of attack.

Shirin, 49, who lives in the southern part of Tehran, said every call or text to friends and family in recent days has felt like it could be the last.

“We don’t know if tomorrow we will be alive,” she said.

Many Iranians feel conflicted. Some support Israel's targeting of Iranian political and military officials they see as repressive. Others staunchly defend the country and retaliatory strikes on Israel. Then, there are those who oppose Iran’s rulers, but still don't want to see their country bombed.

To stay, or to go? The Associated Press interviewed five people in Iran and one Iranian American in the US over the phone. All spoke either on the condition of anonymity or only allowed their first names to be used, for fear of retribution from the state against them or their families.

Most of the calls ended abruptly and within minutes, cutting off conversations as people grew nervous or because the connection dropped. Iran’s government has acknowledged disrupting internet access. It says it's to protect the country, though that has blocked average Iranians from getting information from the outside world.

Iranians in the diaspora wait anxiously for news from relatives. One, an Iranian American human rights researcher in the US, said he last heard from relatives when some were trying to flee Tehran earlier in the week. He believes that lack of gas and traffic prevented them from leaving.

The most heartbreaking interaction, he said, was when his older cousins with whom he grew up in Iran told him “We don’t know where to go. If we die, we die.”

“Their sense was just despair,” he said.

Some families have made the decision to split up.

A 23-year-old Afghan refugee who has lived in Iran for four years said he stayed behind in Tehran but sent his wife and newborn son out of the city after a strike Monday hit a nearby pharmacy.

“It was a very bad shock for them,” he said.

Some, like Shirin, said fleeing was not an option. The apartment buildings in Tehran are towering and dense. Her father has Alzheimer’s and needs an ambulance to move. Her mother's severe arthritis would make even a short trip extremely painful.

Still, hoping escape might be possible, she spent the last several days trying to gather their medications. Her brother waited at a gas station until 3 a.m., only to be turned away when the fuel ran out. As of Monday, gas was being rationed to under 20 liters (5 gallons) per driver at stations across Iran after an Israeli strike set fire to the world's largest gas field.

Some people, like Arshia, said they are just tired.

“I don’t want to go in traffic for 40 hours, 30 hours, 20 hours, just to get to somewhere that might get bombed eventually,” he said.

The 22-year-old has been staying in the house with his parents since the initial Israeli strike. He said his once-lively neighborhood of Saadat Abad in northwestern Tehran is now a ghost town. Schools are closed. Very few people even step outside to walk their dogs. Most local stores have run out of drinking water and cooking oil. Others closed.

Still, Arshia said the prospect of finding a new place is too daunting.

“We don’t have the resources to leave at the moment,” he said.

Residents are on their own

No air raid sirens went off as Israeli strikes began pounding Tehran before dawn Friday. For many, it was an early sign civilians would have to go it alone.

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Tehran was a low-slung city, many homes had basements to shelter in, and there were air raid drills and sirens. Now the capital is packed with close-built high-rise apartments without shelters.

“It's a kind of failing of the past that they didn’t build shelters,” said a 29-year-old Tehran resident who left the city Monday. “Even though we’ve been under the shadow of a war, as long as I can remember.”

Her friend's boyfriend was killed while going to the store.

“You don’t really expect your boyfriend or your anyone, really to leave the house and never return when they just went out for a routine normal shopping trip,” she said.

Those who choose to relocate do so without help from the government. The state has said it is opening mosques, schools and metro stations for use as shelters. Some are closed, others overcrowded.

Hundreds crammed into one Tehran metro station Friday night. Small family groups lay on the floor. One student, a refugee from another country, said she spent 12 hours in the station with her relatives.

“Everyone there was panicking because of the situation,” she said. “Everyone doesn’t know what will happen next, if there is war in the future and what they should do. People think nowhere is safe for them.”

Soon after leaving the station, she saw that Israel had warned a swath of Tehran to evacuate.

“For immigrant communities, this is so hard to live in this kind of situation,” she said, explaining she feels like she has nowhere to escape to, especially not her home country, which she asked not be identified.

Fear of Iran mingles with fear of Israel

For Shirin, the hostilities are bittersweet. Despite being against the theocracy and its treatment of women, the idea that Israel may determine the future does not sit well with her.

“As much as we want the end of this regime, we didn’t want it to come at the hands of a foreign government,” she said. “We would have preferred that if there were to be a change, it would be the result of a people’s movement in Iran.”

Meanwhile, the 29-year-old who left Tehran had an even more basic message for those outside Iran:

“I just want people to remember that whatever is happening here, it’s not routine business for us. People’s lives here — people’s livelihoods — feel as important to them as they feel to anyone in any other place. How would you feel if your city or your country was under bombardment by another country, and people were dying left and right?”

“We are kind of like, this can’t be happening. This can’t be my life.”