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Twenty-five more Palestinians have returned to Gaza through the Rafah crossing following its long-awaited partial reopening, describing an exhausting journey through humiliating Israeli security measures, while patients in need of urgent medical treatment abroad are being transferred to the border.

This comes as the Wafa news agency reported a Palestinian man was killed by Israeli forces in Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis, on Thursday, as Israeli attacks continue despite a “ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip.

The group of 25 – the third batch to return since the heavily restricted reopening of the crossing into Egypt – entered the Strip at 3am local time (01:00 GMT), with buses delivering them to Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis more than 20 hours after they left the Egyptian city of El Arish.

Hours later, 13 Palestinian patients, accompanied by family members and World Health Organization (WHO) officials, were transferred from a hospital towards the crossing for medical treatment abroad.

Some of the returnees, visibly fatigued from their ordeal, told an Al Jazeera team in Gaza that they had been interrogated and insulted by Israeli forces as they passed through security controls.

Footage showed emotional scenes as returning Palestinians embraced loved ones from whom they had long been separated, and registered firsthand the scenes of devastation caused by the war in their homeland.

“The feeling is like being caught between happiness and sadness,” one returnee, Aicha Balaoui, told the Reuters news agency.

“I’m happy to be back and to see my family, my husband and my loved ones, thank God. But I also feel sad for my country after seeing the destruction. I never imagined the devastation would be this severe.”

She said while she had lived in comfort and safety abroad, “I wasn’t at peace because it wasn’t my place.

“My place is here. My place is Gaza,” she said.

The Rafah crossing with Egypt, the sole route in or out of Gaza for nearly all of the territory’s more than two million inhabitants, was closed by Israeli authorities for most of the war, but was partially reopened on Monday.

The reopening of the crossing – to allow the return of Palestinians who have left, and the evacuation of patients requiring medical treatment outside the Strip – is one of the terms of the US-brokered “ceasefire” agreement to end the war in Gaza.

Only Palestinians who left Gaza during the war are being permitted to return, and people travelling in both directions are being subjected to strict security vetting – a process which returnees have described as humiliating and abusive.

Palestinian women who returned earlier this week described to Al Jazeera having their hands bound and eyes covered, being interrogated and subjected to full body searches as part of the security screening.

The International Commission to Support Palestinian People’s Rights (ICSPR) has said the strict Israeli measures have turned the Rafah crossing “into a tool of control and domination rather than a humanitarian passage”.

Only 13 patients awaiting transfer

Reporting from Khan Younis, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said 13 Palestinian patients had been taken by bus from a hospital in the Gazan city, due to cross to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing in order to receive medical treatment abroad.

Families of the patients had begun receiving phone calls late on Wednesday telling them to prepare for their transfer, he said. Israel had briefly suspended coordination over the medical transfers before resuming it hours later.

But the pace of the medical evacuations since the crossing’s partial reopening was slower than the numbers promised, and far short of what was required to meet the needs of the approximately 20,000 patients in need of medical treatment in other countries.

While the agreement had spoken of 50 patients being evacuated each day, each accompanied by two family members, only about 30 had been transferred so far this week.

“If we keep this pace each passing day, we’re looking at at least three years” to complete the required medical evacuations, Mahmoud said.

“This is a very long time for those in need of immediate medical care.”

Gaza’s healthcare system has been devastated by Israel’s genocidal war on the enclave, with 22 hospitals put out of service and 1,700 medical workers killed, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Israeli attacks continue

Meanwhile, as the returns played out in southern Gaza, Israel continued to carry out attacks across the Strip, a day after 23 Palestinians were killed in one of the deadliest days since the October “ceasefire” began.

Israel carried out air strikes east of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, and east of Khan Younis in the south, Al Jazeera teams reported.

Reporting from Khan Younis, Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud said there had also been Israeli air strikes, gunfire and heavy artillery shelling targeting Gaza City’s eastern Tuffah neighbourhood, which was next to the so-called “yellow line” demarcating territory under Israeli military control.

While the international media has rightly focused on the genocide and enormous displacement in Gaza alongside the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, the 300 murders inside Israel in 2025, 252 of whom were Palestinian victims, garnered little to no media coverage outside Israel. Yet last year marked the deadliest year on record for murders among Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 21 percent of Israel’s population but sustain 80 percent of the murders. That is one murder every 36 hours.

The international media have also covered the rise in anti-Semitism across the world, even as there has been little to no media coverage of how Israel has been exaggerating and instrumentalising a Zionist notion of anti-Semitism to create moral panic among Jews everywhere. Indeed, when I speak to Jewish friends in Israel, they often ask how I, who live in London, cope with anti-Semitism. As consumers of Israeli news, they can be forgiven for thinking that Jews across the world are in imminent danger.

These two phenomena – the crime epidemic within Palestinian communities inside Israel and the weaponisation of anti-Semitism to amplify Jewish fear – might seem totally unconnected. Yet there is a clear thread linking them, and it is called demographic engineering.

The foundational acts

Demographic engineering has been at the heart of the Zionist project. During the 1948 war, about 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in what Fayez Sayegh called “racial elimination”. As part of this process, Palestinian cities were depopulated, and about 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed. By 1951, the Palestinians who had become refugees had been “replaced” by a similar number of Jewish immigrants, both Holocaust survivors from Europe and Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries, thus transforming the state’s racial composition without altering its overall population size.

In the wake of the war, Israel not only disregarded United Nations Resolution 194 affirming the right of Palestinians who had been made refugees in 1948 to return to their homes, but in 1950 it passed the Law of Return, bestowing “on Jews worldwide the right to enter Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship regardless of their countries of origin and whether or not they can show links to Israel-Palestine, while withholding any comparable right from Palestinians, including those with documented ancestral homes in the country”.

Over the past two years, a number of Israeli politicians and influencers have characterised what Israel has been doing in the territories it occupied in 1967 as completing the job left undone in 1948: “A second, real Nakba, to finish [former Israeli Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s work,” one journalist quipped. Simultaneously, within Israel, a different kind of demographic strategy is unfolding, even as the overall objective remains the same.

Crime as an impetus to leave

Itamar Ben-Gvir is surely not the first minister of national security to have allowed criminal gangs to terrorise Palestinian communities. But on Ben Gvir’s watch, the murders have reached record levels. And 2026 seems to be following the trend, with 31 more Palestinians murdered during the first month.

On the one hand, Israel has used the soaring crime to portray Palestinian citizens as uncivilised and barbaric, extending the dehumanisation from stateless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to its own citizens. On the other hand, it has enabled criminals to terrorise Palestinian towns.

Indeed, the police have solved only 15 percent of the murders within the Palestinian community while doing little, if anything, to stop criminals from collecting “protection fees” from businesses – fees that extract an estimated two billion shekels ($650m) a year from the community.

On January 22, Palestinians launched the largest demonstration since 2019, waving black flags while chanting slogans accusing the police of total abandonment. The following day, the organisers called a general strike, with one of the organisers, Mohammed Shlaata, making it clear that responsibility for the violence lies with the authorities: “We are in a state of emergency,” he said. “We have a clear finger of accusation – we blame the police.”

Talking to Palestinian friends, some tell me they fear for their children’s lives and want them to leave the country, while others have packed their bags and left. Admittedly, the number of those leaving is low, but Palestinian citizens are reaching a boiling point.

Anti-Semitism and negative migration

At the same time that the government does nothing to quell criminal activity and lawlessness within Palestinian communities in Israel, it exaggerates and instrumentalises a Zionist notion of anti-Semitism to continuously reassert Jewish victimhood.

While much has been written on the use of a false notion of anti-Semitism – that conflates criticism of Israel and Zionism with anathema towards Jews – to silence Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, much less has been said about the mobilisation of anti-Semitism to address Israel’s problem of negative migration.

Since 2023, more Jews have been leaving the country than entering. In 2024, the number of citizens leaving Israel was 26,000 higher than the number of immigrants entering it; in 2025, the gap was about 37,000 Israelis. In other words, negative migration has jumped by more than 42 percent, and Israeli officials are worried that this trend is taking root and even accelerating.

Accordingly, both the Israeli public and the Jewish diaspora are told again and again that anti-Semitism across the globe has gone rampant. Jews are told that the horrific Bondi massacre in Australia is an indication of a new global trend, that in the United Kingdom anti-Semitism has been normalised, and that in Europe Jews are afraid to wear kippahs.

Anti-Semitism has undoubtedly soared over the past two years, and there is obviously a kernel of truth in these articles. But in contrast to the very real panic among Palestinian citizens, which the state has ignored, in the case of anti-Semitism, the state dramatically exaggerates and instrumentalises the evidence to produce a moral panic. The message is clear: Jews across the world should fear for their lives, and therefore those who live in Israel should be wary of leaving, while the only way diasporic Jews can be safe is by migrating to Israel.

Supremacy as glue

The glue holding all of the demographic strategies Israel deploys together is the belief in Jewish exceptionalism and supremacy. The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank are justified through the dehumanisation of Palestinians; the neglect of the murders and crime in Palestinian communities within Israel is informed by racial discrimination that has been ongoing since 1948; and Israel is weaponising racism against Jews to curb negative migration. The ultimate objective is to guarantee the racial-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish, while the dream is a pure Jewish state.