A year of escalating conflict in the Middle East has ushered in a new era of regional displacement

A year of conflict has ushered in a new era of mass displacement in the Middle East.

Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent sustained Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Israel has expanded its operations on multiple fronts into the West Bank, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon.

With fighting continuing unabated and the prospects of a direct confrontation between Iran and Israel increasing, the region is now entering a new period of internal and cross-border displacement that has already uprooted millions of people.

As migration scholars, we fear that the consequences of such displacement will continue to affect the region for years to come – and will likely further hamper the ability of the region’s people to live a safe life.

Displaced and imprisoned in Gaza

Israel’s continued attacks have forced nearly 2 million Palestinians to flee their homes in Gaza over the past year, representing 9 out of 10 residents of the densely populated strip.

What is unique about the scale of the displacement in Gaza is that almost all internally displaced persons are trapped and unable to leave the area amid Israel’s continued border closure and bombardment.

This has intensified successive humanitarian crises, including famine and the spread of disease, along with countless other hardships that make normal life nearly impossible.

For many Palestinians in Gaza, the years-long bombardment has led to repeated displacement, as Israeli attacks shift from area to area amid shrinking humanitarian space.

And while there are complex historical and geopolitical reasons surrounding the border closures, international law experts argue that Egypt and Israel have violated international refugee law by refusing to allow Palestinians in Gaza to cross the Rafah border to apply for asylum.

The situation in Gaza is structurally different from previous displacement crises in the region – even in civil war-torn Syria, where cross-border aid operations have been consistently on the brink of collapse. That’s as Israel continues to restrict and block aid to the area, and humanitarian workers are struggling to provide the bare minimum of food, shelter and medical care amid bombings that have rarely stopped.

To make matters worse, the experience of the past year has shown that refugee camps, civilian apartments, UN schools and hospitals serving civilians and refugees are not safe spaces. Israel often justifies its attacks on such locations by saying they are being used by Hamas or Hezbollah, despite formal UN discussions on many of these allegations. These targeted Israeli attacks have also killed at least 220 UN workers in the past year – more than any other crisis on record.

This contributes to humanitarian workers’ difficulty accessing populations in need, especially displaced persons. For its part, the United States remains the leading donor to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the UN Palestine Refugee Agency (UNRWA), as well as the main arms supplier to Israel.

Beyond Gaza, to Lebanon

In Lebanon, mass displacements are also the result of Israel’s developing war with Hezbollah.

Even before the escalation of the conflict at the Lebanon-Israel border in September, nearly 100,000 Lebanese had been driven from their homes in the south of the country due to Israeli shelling. Meanwhile, approximately 63,000 Israelis were internally displaced from the north of the country as a result of Hezbollah’s rocket attacks.

But as of late September 2024, Israeli attacks on Hezbollah and Palestinian targets in Beirut and across Lebanon have killed hundreds of civilians and exponentially increased internal and cross-border displacement. More than 1 million Lebanese have now fled their homes within days as a result of the Israeli invasion and bombings.

In addition, Syrian refugees and Lebanon’s large migrant worker population were also displaced. Many slept on the streets or in makeshift tents and had no access to buildings converted into shelters for Lebanese.

In another stark example of reverse migration, around 230,000 people – both Lebanese and Syrians – have fled across the border into Syria.

Rounding out recent regional conflicts with the displacement and crisis of the post-2011 Arab uprising, returning home is an unsafe option for many Syrians who still fear repression under the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Israel’s continued invasion of Lebanon is likely to exacerbate these trends, as the country has ordered numerous towns and cities in the south of the country – miles above the UN-recognized buffer zone – to evacuate.

Layers of regional displacement

For decades, the Middle East has experienced many large-scale, cross-border displacements for a myriad of reasons. The original forced displacement of Palestinians around Israel’s creation in 1948 and subsequent conflicts created the world’s longest-standing refugee situation, with approximately 6 million Palestinians living across the Levant. The first Gulf War, sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 created millions of refugees, with long-lasting political consequences for the region.

More recently, the 2011 Arab uprisings and the wars that followed in Syria, Yemen and Libya have created millions of refugees as well as internally displaced peoples, with nearly 6 million Syrians still living in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan and another 6 million displaced within Syria. . As Syrians have largely not returned home, international organizations have become a semi-permanent safety net to provide basic services to refugees and host communities.

New layers of displacement in Lebanon – nationals, refugees and migrant workers – and cross-border movements into Syria will further strain the underfunded humanitarian aid system.

Moreover, the current war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is not the first time that conflict between the state and its neighbor to the north has preceded large-scale displacement. In an attempt to eliminate the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982. Israel’s 1982 invasion led to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of between 1,500 and 3,000 Palestinian civilians – carried out by Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies – which showed that military operations that do not distinguish between militants and civilians can have devastating consequences for displaced populations.

Citizens who bear the brunt

Between 600,000 and 900,000 Lebanese fled abroad during the entire civil war from 1975 to 1990.

Two decades later, Israel invaded Lebanon again in 2006 in an attempt to eradicate Hezbollah, causing some 900,000 Lebanese to flee the south – both domestically and across the border with Syria.

While the speed and scale of Lebanese displacement in 2006 was unprecedented at the time, the number of people forced to flee in late September and early October 2024 quickly surpassed that record.

The region is therefore well aware of the consequences of mass displacement. But what is clear a year into the current conflict is that the Middle East is now in a new era of displacement – ​​in terms of scale and nature.

And the number of families’ lives disrupted by this new era of displacement only seems to be increasing. Tensions in the region have further escalated due to new missile attacks on Israel from Iran and the threat of retaliation by Israel.

The experience of decades of conflict in the region shows that civilians are most likely to bear the brunt of the fighting – whether through forced displacement, the inability to access food or medical care, or death.

Only through a cessation of current hostilities and a lasting ceasefire across the region can the conditions be created under which at-risk populations can begin to return and rebuild. This is especially true for the displaced people in Gaza, who have been repeatedly driven from their homes, but have no borders across which to reach safety, and for whom a political solution remains elusive.