The 1956-57 occupation of the Gaza Strip: Israeli proposals to resettle the Palestinian refugees

Abstract

The Gaza district is the southernmost section of the coastal plain of Under the 1947 partition plan, this district was to form a part of t Arab state, but during the 1948 war much of the district was se annexed to, Israel. The Egyptians held Gaza City together with two and several villages forming what came to be known as the Gaza Stri is about 25 miles long and varies in width from four miles in the no miles in the south. Its population trebled from eighty thousand in 19 two hundred and forty thousand at the end of the 1948 war, creati humanitarian problem of tens of thousands of refugees crammed into To provide for the needs of the Palestinian refugees, the United Nati Assembly in December 1949 established the United Nations Relie Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). The Palestinian refugees clung stubbornly to the right of retu embodied in UN Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948 and re almost yearly by the General Assembly. The essence of this resolutio the repatriation of, or compensation to, the refugees. Howeve repatriation may have seemed to outsiders, the refugees themselves b they would eventually return to their homes and villages in what b Throughout the early 1950s, refugees continued to cross the arm 'infiltrating' back to their villages either to collect possessions unharvested crops or, in some cases, to raid Israeli settlements adjac Strip.1 In an effort to combat this persistent Arab 'infiltration', the I out 'retaliatory' attacks against 'infiltrators' in general and civilian ta Gaza Strip in particular