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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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Why Meeting Trump's Military Spending Target Could Be Tough for NATO's Lowest Spender

Flags at NATO Headquarters ahead to press conference following NATO Military Chiefs of Defense meeting in Brussels, Belgium, 18 January 2024. (EPA)
Flags at NATO Headquarters ahead to press conference following NATO Military Chiefs of Defense meeting in Brussels, Belgium, 18 January 2024. (EPA)
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Why Meeting Trump's Military Spending Target Could Be Tough for NATO's Lowest Spender

Flags at NATO Headquarters ahead to press conference following NATO Military Chiefs of Defense meeting in Brussels, Belgium, 18 January 2024. (EPA)
Flags at NATO Headquarters ahead to press conference following NATO Military Chiefs of Defense meeting in Brussels, Belgium, 18 January 2024. (EPA)

While Europe’s military heavyweights have already said that meeting President Donald Trump’s potential challenge to spend up to 5% of their economic output on security won't be easy, it would be an especially tall order for Spain.

The eurozone’s fourth-largest economy, Spain ranked last in the 32-nation military alliance last year for the share of its GDP that it contributed to the military, estimated to be 1.28%. That’s after NATO members pledged in 2014 to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense — a target that 23 countries were belatedly expected to meet last year amid concerns about the war in Ukraine.

When pressed, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and others in his government have emphasized Spain’s commitment to European security and to NATO. Since 2018, Spain has increased its defense spending by about 50% from 8.5 billion euros ($8.9 billion) to 12.8 billion euros ($13.3 billion) in 2023. Following years of underinvestment, the Sánchez government says the spending increase is proof of the commitment Spain made to hit NATO’s 2% target by 2029.

But for Spain to spend even more — and faster — would be tough, defense analysts and former officials say, largely because of the unpopular politics of militarism in the Southern European nation. The country’s history of dictatorship and its distance from Europe’s eastern flank also play a role.

“The truth is defense spending is not popular in European countries, whether it’s Spain or another European country,” said Nicolás Pascual de la Parte, a former Spanish ambassador to NATO who is currently a member of European Parliament from Spain’s conservative Popular Party. “We grew accustomed after the Second World War to delegate our ultimate defense to the United States of America through its military umbrella, and specifically its nuclear umbrella."

“It's true that we need to spend more,” Pascual de la Parte said of Spain.

The politics of military spending Spain joined NATO in 1982, a year after the young, isolated democracy survived a coup attempt by its armed forces and seven years after the end of the 40-year military dictatorship led by Gen. Francisco Franco. Under a 1986 referendum, a narrow majority of Spaniards voted to stay in the alliance, but it wasn’t until 1999 that the country that is now Europe’s fourth-largest by population joined NATO’s military structure.

In that sense, “we are a very young member of NATO,” said Carlota Encina, a defense and security analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute think tank in Madrid.

Opinion polls generally show military engagement as unpopular among Spanish voters. An overwhelming majority of Spaniards were opposed to their country’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war, polls showed at the time, but support for NATO in recent years has grown.

About 70% of Spaniards were in favor of NATO sending military equipment, weapons and ammunition to Ukraine soon after Russia began its full-scale invasion of the country, according to a March 2022 poll conducted by the state-owned Center for Sociological Studies, or CIS. But only about half were in favor of Spain increasing its own defense budget, according to another survey CIS conducted that month.

Across the spectrum, political analysts and former Spanish politicians say militarism just isn’t great politics. Madrid is nearly 3,000 kilometers (roughly 1,800 miles) west of Kiev, unlike the capitals of Poland, Estonia or Latvia, which are closer and have exceeded the alliance's 2% target based on last year’s estimates.

Ignasi Guardans, a Spanish former member of the European Union’s parliament, said many Spaniards value their army for humanitarian efforts and aid work, like the help thousands of soldiers provided after the destructive Valencia flash floods last year.

“Now the army has returned to have some respect,” Guardans said, “but that’s not NATO.”

Encina said Spanish politicians generally feel much more pressure to spend publicly on other issues. “This is something that politicians here always feel and fear,” she said. The thinking goes, “why do we need to invest in defense and not in social issues?”

International missions Spain’s leaders point out that while they have yet to meet NATO’s budget floor, it’s unfair to only consider the country’s NATO contributions as a percentage of GDP to measure of its commitments to Europe and its own security.

Officials often point to the country’s various EU and UN missions and deployments, arguing that through them, the country contributes in good form.

“Spain, as a member of NATO, is a serious, trustworthy, responsible and committed ally,” Defense Minister Margarita Robles told reporters this week following comments made by Trump to a journalist who asked the US president about NATO’s low spenders. “And at this moment, we have more than 3,800 men and women in peace missions, many of them with NATO,” Robles said.

Spain’s armed forces are deployed in 16 overseas missions, according to the defense ministry, with ground forces taking part in NATO missions in Latvia, Slovakia and Romania and close to 700 soldiers in Lebanon as part of the country’s largest UN mission.

Spain also shares the Morón and Rota naval bases in the south of the country with the US Navy, which stations six AEGIS destroyers at the Rota base in Cádiz.

Slippery metrics Analysts also point to the fact that Spain’s government routinely spends more on defense than what is budgeted, through extraordinary contributions that can exceed the official budget during some years by 20% to 30%.

“The reality is, the whole thing is not very transparent,” Guardans said.

Pascual de la Parte, who was Spain’s NATO ambassador from 2017 to 2018, said the 2% metric shouldn’t be the only measure since not every NATO member accounts for their defense budgets in the same way.

“There is no agreement between allies in choosing which criteria decide the real spending effort,” he said, adding that, for example, while some countries include things like soldiers’ pensions in their accounting, others don’t. “Ultimately, they can involve very disparate realities.”