Back in May, Al Jazeera published a story about a Palestinian man named Adel Atallah. In 2007, Atallah left his native Gaza to escape the Israeli blockade, joining relatives who were living in Sudan, which has long had diplomatic relations with Palestine. He found a job in construction in the capital city of Khartoum, got married, and had five children. Atallah built, as he told Al Jazeera, “a stable life.”
But after a civil war broke out in Sudan this past April, Atallah decided that he and his family had to leave. “The situation exploded suddenly, and then things escalated until it became crazy,” he told Al Jazeera. “The sound of bullets and gunfire did not stop around us. Even corpses were on the streets.” So for the second time in his life, Atallah fled violence and chaos.
His destination? Gaza.
I wonder what’s become of Atallah and his family, and the hundreds of other Palestinians who left Sudan in the spring to come to what was, at the time, the comparative safety of Gaza. They had no way of knowing that their refuge would become what the UN is now calling an “unfolding catastrophe” in the midst of an unprecedented war with Israel, where as many as 10,000 people have been killed so far.
Even before the war, Gaza faced the risk of military action from neighboring Israel and was often described as an “open-air prison,” which gives you a sense of just how bad things were in Sudan when Palestinians began leaving. But unlike the one in Gaza, Sudan’s humanitarian crisis has largely escaped the world’s attention.
“The largest child displacement crisis in the world”
The civil war in Sudan, which pits forces loyal to the country’s de facto ruler, army Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the paramilitary leader Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, began when fighting broke out on April 15 in the country’s capital of Khartoum. Since then, at least 9,000 civilians have been reported killed and more than 12,000 injured, though the true…
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