Archive December 15, 2025

On December 3, Israel announced that the Rafah border crossing with Egypt would reopen “in the coming days”, allowing Palestinians to leave Gaza for the first time in months. The statement was, of course, framed as a humanitarian gesture that would allow those in urgent need to travel for medical care, education or family reunification to leave.

However, Israel’s announcement was met almost immediately with Egypt’s denial, followed by a firm rejection from several Arab and Muslim states.

To the rest of the world, this response may seem cruel. It may seem like Arab states want to forcibly keep in Gaza Palestinians desperate to evacuate to safety. This fits right into the Israeli narrative that neighbouring Arab countries are responsible for Palestinian suffering because they would not “let them in”.

This is a falsehood that has unfortunately made its way into Western media, even though it is easily disproved.

Let us be clear: No, Arab states are not keeping us against our will in Gaza, and neither is Hamas.

They want to make sure that when and if some of us evacuate temporarily, we are able to come back. We want the same – a guarantee of return. Yet, Israel refuses to grant it; it made clear in its December 3 announcement that the Rafah crossing would be open only one way – for Palestinians to leave.

So this was clearly a move meant to jump-start forced displacement of the Palestinian population from their homeland.

For Palestinians, this is not a new reality but part of a long and deliberate pattern. Since its inception, the Israeli state has focused on the dispossession, erasure, and forced displacement of the Palestinians. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and were not allowed to return. My 88-year-old grandfather was among them. He still keeps the Tabu (land registry document) for the dunams of land he owns in his village of Barqa, 37km (23 miles) north of Gaza, where we are still not allowed to return.

In 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza, it forbade Palestinians who were studying or working abroad from returning to their homes. In the occupied West Bank, where colonisation has not stopped for the past 58 years, Palestinians are regularly expelled from their homes and lands.

In the past two years alone, Israel has seized approximately 55,000 dunams of Palestinian land, displacing more than 2,800 Palestinians. In Jerusalem, Palestinians whose families had lived in the holy city for centuries risk losing their residency there if they cannot prove it is their “centre of life”. In the past 25 years, more than 10,000 Palestinian residencies have been revoked.

Since October 2023, Israel has repeatedly attempted to engineer forced mass displacement in Gaza – dividing the Strip into isolated zones separated by military corridors and “safe” axes and launching successive operations to push residents of the north towards the south. Each wave of mass bombing carried the same underlying objective: to uproot the people of Gaza from their homes and push them towards the border with Egypt. The most recent push occurred just before the latest ceasefire took effect.

According to Diaa Rashwan, chairman of the Egyptian State Information Service, Cairo rejected Israel’s proposal because it was an attempt to shun its commitments outlined in the second phase of the ceasefire. That phase requires Israel to withdraw from Gaza, support the reconstruction process, allow the Strip to be administered by a Palestinian committee, and facilitate the deployment of a security force to stabilise the situation. By announcing Rafah’s reopening, Israel sought to bypass these obligations and redirect the political conversation towards depopulation rather than reconstruction and recovery.

That Israel wants to create the conditions to make our expulsion inevitable is clear from other policies as well. It continues to bombard the Strip, killing hundreds of civilians and terrorising hundreds of thousands.

It continues to prevent adequate amounts of food and medicines from getting in. It is allowing no reconstruction materials or temporary housing. It is doing everything to maximise the suffering of the Palestinian people.

This reality is made even more brutal by the harsh winter. Cold winds tear through overcrowded camps filled with exhausted people who have endured every form of trauma imaginable. Yet despite hunger, exhaustion, and despair, we continue to cling to our land and reject any Israeli efforts to displace and erase us.

We also reject any form of external guardianship or control over our fate. We demand full Palestinian sovereignty over our land, our resources, and our crossings. Our position is clear: the Rafah crossing must be opened in both directions; not as a tool of displacement, but as a right to free movement.

Rafah must be accessible for those who wish to return, and for those who need to leave temporarily: students seeking to continue their education abroad, patients in urgent need of medical treatment unavailable in Gaza, and families who have been separated and long to be reunited. Thousands of critically ill Palestinians have been denied life-saving care due to the siege, while hundreds of students holding offers and scholarships from prestigious universities around the world have been unable to travel to pursue their education.

Rafah should also be open to those who simply need rest after years of trauma – to step outside Gaza briefly and return with dignity. Mobility is not a privilege; it is a basic human right.

What we demand is simple: the right to determine our future, without coercion, without bargaining over our existence, and without being pushed into forced displacement disguised as a humanitarian project.

It is the summer of 2024, and a 13-year-old boy has just been added to a private Signal group by a recruiter with a menacing username.

A message soon appears in the chat: “Are you ready to murder someone?”

Within hours, the chat is filled with new handles.

They offer the teenager mentorship.

The tone at times is reassuring, promising cash and a sense of belonging.

They tell him not to worry, that after he carries out the shooting, he will be sent to a special care facility for children and teenagers, where they will be able to get him out.

One user says, “Brother, before a job it’s normal to feel nervous, but after you fire the first shot you’ll see everything becomes easy.”

But the messages are also laced with threats.

The recruiter who had added him to the group warns the boy, “If you take the weapon and disappear, we will come and find you, brother.” He adds that he would only get paid “if you hit him – he has to die”.

He continues with an instruction: “Go behind him one or two metres and shoot him three or four times in the back.”

He then gives him practical advice on handling a weapon, including telling him “don’t play with the trigger”, and sends him instructional YouTube videos on how to load and shoot a pistol in a steady stream of messages.

Eventually, the original recruiter and the other users fall largely silent, and the exchanges largely narrow to just the boy and a user, whom police would later identify as a 25-year-old who was a key figure in a Stockholm-based gang.

“It’s hard now, but later you’ll be a king, brother,” he assured the boy just before the planned shooting.

“I will finish him,” came the reply.

Moments later, the boy sent panicked messages. The police or security guards were on the way, he wrote, as he begged for a taxi.

The boy had shot his target, but the man had survived.

Only 48 hours had passed between the boy being added to the Signal chat and the shooting.

Police arrested him shortly after, but due to his age, he was not convicted or sentenced.

He was placed in state care and remains under social services supervision.

When the recruitment process began remains unclear, but investigators believed it likely started when he responded to an ad – possibly a so-called murder contract – circulating on social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram, or on encrypted apps like Telegram, where children are now usually recruited.

In late 2024, Telegram shut down a channel called Samurai Barnen (Samurai Children), which had amassed about 11,000 members, after Swedish police notified the platform.

Screenshots later published by local media outlets from the channel show how the “murder contracts” appeared.

Murder:

Malmo urgent: 800k-1m ($85,000-107,000)

Gothenburg urgent: 300-400k ($32,000-43,000)

Stockholm urgent: 500k ($53,000)

Denmark: 1 million ($107,000)

Throw a grenade:

Malmo: 30-50k ($3,100-5-300k)

The attacks are often framed as “challenges” or “missions”, which the police say is a “gamification technique” to make the posts more engaging and less intimidating for children.

The timeframe from a child’s initial contact with a recruiter to carrying out a violent act can range from a matter of days to a month, Salman Khan, a project manager of an exit programme for children in gangs at Fryshuset, Sweden’s largest youth organisation, told Al Jazeera.

“Ten years ago, recruiters would have to go to a place where kids are physically, but now social media is the way,” said Khan, who works with a programme called 180 Degrees, which connects children who have been involved in crime with positive adult role models who can help them leave that world behind.

Khan describes the recruitment process as a form of grooming where boys, and to a lesser extent girls, as young as 12, who he says don’t necessarily know the difference between “play” and the “real life” consequences of carrying out a violent act, are lured into a criminal underworld.

In his conversations with children in SiS facilities, Khan has observed how the role many aspire to in gangs has been inverted in recent years.

“It has become a status thing to be the one to throw a grenade or to shoot someone rather than be a gang leader. Ten years ago, everyone wanted to be Tony Montana [the fictional crime boss in the film Scarface],” he explained.

The shift reflects how social media and the glamourisation of violence in popular culture have made instant notoriety more desirable than lasting authority, Khan added.

Carrying out an attack can give the child a sense of validation in the gang and access to fast money that can get them the “clothes, chains, phones, cars and luxury life” they see on social media and in television series.