They left Gaza to survive, not to disappear completely. More than 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza remain overseas after fleeing Israel’s genocide. Some escaped through Egypt for medical treatment, while others left with wounded children, elderly parents, or whatever relatives they could still protect.

Many expect to return once the bombing stops and a real ceasefire actually takes place. They remain scattered across Cairo, Turkey, and other countries, watching their homeland from a distance while the path back remains blocked by insecurity, destroyed homes, and genocide.

As per credible sources, only around 7,000 Palestinians have returned to Gaza. For the rest, exile has become a waiting room without a clear door out. Israel still controls more than 60% of the territory, airstrikes continue, and most Palestinians inside Gaza remain crowded into areas of temporary shelter with inadequate aid and no real reconstruction in sight.

Unfortunately, this is not ordinary migration. It is not the search for a better salary, a foreign passport, or a comfortable life abroad. In fact, it is forced displacement shaped by bombing, grief, closed crossings and the fear that temporary escape may become permanent removal.

Leaving Was Not Abandonment

The powerful story of Omar al-Hassayna shows the scale of the wound. He fled Gaza for Cairo after an Israeli strike destroyed apartment buildings in Gaza City where relatives had gathered for shelter. Consequently, around 308 members of his extended family were killed in that attack. His wife, four adult sons and four small grandchildren were among the dead. In August, he watched from Cairo as relatives buried 112 family members whose bodies had been recovered from the rubble, while dozens were still missing.

A man carrying that grief is not a migrant who has “moved on.” In reality, he is a survivor whose family, business, neighbourhood, and future were torn apart by Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Like thousands of others abroad, he is not free in the way outsiders imagine. He is safe from the immediate bomb, but not free from Gaza. His dead are there along with his memories and identity.

That is why the language matters. To call these Palestinians simply “overseas” or “abroad” misses the violence behind their absence. Many were pushed out by conditions Israel created: mass bombardment, destroyed hospitals, starvation, rubble-filled streets, and the collapse of ordinary life. Their displacement cannot be separated from the machinery that made Gaza unlivable.

The Right to Return Is Not Sentiment

For Palestinians, return is not nostalgia, but a political and moral right.

In reality, a person cannot be told to leave under fire and then be treated as though their absence has weakened their claim to home. A family does not lose Gaza because it crossed into Egypt to save a wounded child. A mother does not lose her street because her house was bombed. Likewise, a refugee does not stop being Palestinian because the world finds their return inconvenient.

This is why Gaza’s new exile carries the shadow of the Nakba. Palestinians know what can happen when “temporary” displacement becomes permanent. In 1948, families who believed they would soon return became refugees for generations. Today, many Gazans fear the same pattern.

In this regard, Reuters reported that some Israeli politicians have urged policies encouraging Gaza’s population to leave and preventing those who left from returning. That is not a minor political detail. It reveals why Palestinians are right to fear that displacement is not only a side effect of Israel’s genocide, but one of its possible outcomes.

Families Scattered Across Countries

Unfortunately, Gaza’s exile has split families into pieces. One daughter may be in Turkey for medical reasons, while her brother is in Cairo. A widow may be living with children in another rented room. Other relatives may still be inside Gaza, surviving in tents or damaged buildings. The family WhatsApp group becomes a map of loss – who escaped, who stayed, who died, who is missing, who cannot cross back.

These separations do not end when the genocidal bombing pauses. They continue in residency problems, unpaid rent, temporary visas, medical bills, language barriers, and the humiliation of depending on savings or charity. Many Gazans abroad cannot work legally or plan long-term. They are not fully settled where they are, yet Gaza remains unsafe and unreconstructed.

This is how genocide continues beyond the battlefield. It breaks the bonds that allow a people to live together, including a home, street, school, work, burial, marriage, memory, and return.

During the last week of August, an Israeli strike hit a building in Bureij refugee camp. Unfortunately, some families could not escape. A four-year-old innocent boy was killed, while his mother and sister were wounded. Moreover, Israel also struck Shati refugee camp, saying weapons were stored inside two mosques but providing no public evidence.

Such attacks are why NAZA cannot be treated as a film about some past violence. It arrived while Palestinians were still being brutally killed by the military system its witnesses describe.

What the Word “NAZA” Hides

NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym for “collateral damage.” It refers to the number of civilians expected to die in an approved strike.

Shockingly, the term turns a mother, a child, or an entire family into a figure beside a proposed target. Their deaths are not discovered only after the bomb falls. According to testimony in the film, they can be anticipated before an attack is authorised.

In fact, the documentary challenges Israel’s claim that Gaza’s civilian toll resulted mainly from accidents, individual failures, or Hamas operating among civilians.

Twenty-Four Voices From Inside the System

The film was directed by renowned Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who worked on the Oscar-winning No Other Land. They spent three straight years gathering testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers.

The interviews were recorded secretly on Tel Aviv rooftops. The faces and voices of these officers were altered because the participants feared retaliation. Some spoke with guilt, while others appeared indifferent or proud. The directors kept the focus on what they did rather than how they felt.

The witnesses describe surveillance, casualty estimates and remote bombing. Several discuss AI-assisted systems that processed information taken from thousands of Palestinian phones. Calls, locations and personal connections could help identify an alleged Hamas member.

One account describes words detected through a child’s phone indicating that her father had returned home. That information could trigger an airstrike on the family residence. Many people identified by these systems were alleged low-ranking members, yet their homes could be bombed while relatives were present.

In fact, an algorithm did not make these decisions alone. Officers supplied the data, commanders set the rules and human beings approved the attacks.

Families Were Included in the Calculation

One insider claims that approval was granted for an attack expected to kill 500 civilians to strike one Hamas member. The Israeli military has denied planning or approving an operation with 500 anticipated deaths.

That denial must be acknowledged, but it does not answer the testimony. Several witnesses describe civilians receiving an acceptable casualty number before strikes. They also describe attacks in which the suspected target was not confirmed inside the building.

Additionally, other accounts concern Palestinians killed after entering exclusion zones that residents could not see. Witnesses also discuss attacks near aid distribution points. Israel acknowledged that civilians were harmed at these locations and said it changed its rules.

The pattern described is not a handful of soldiers disobeying orders. It is a method built into targeting decisions.

The Refugee Camps Show the Killing Has Not Ended

The Bureij attack was not an isolated act of genocide. During the first week of September, 17-year-old Ibrahim al-Hash was killed in an Israeli drone strike in Jabalia refugee camp. Eight days later, drones struck Nuseirat camp and wounded several Palestinians, some critically. Israeli forces also opened fire near Jabalia.

These are densely populated communities where generations of Palestinians displaced during the Nakba have lived. Their homes and shelters have deliberately been attacked throughout the genocide.

Israel says its strikes target militants, weapons stores or people entering restricted areas. In reality, its explanations often come without evidence that families or independent investigators can examine.

By the second week of September, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that Israel had killed 1,369 Palestinians and wounded 4,627 since the October 2025 ceasefire. The wider toll since October 2023 had reached at least 73,783 killed and 174,738 wounded.

Palestinians Had Already Told the World

NAZA does not make Palestinian suffering true because Israelis now describe it. Palestinian journalists, doctors, rescue workers and survivors have documented attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, tents and aid seekers throughout the genocide.

Their testimony was doubted or placed beneath Israeli military statements. The film matters significantly because people who operated the surveillance and targeting systems now describe the machinery in its own language.

Their accounts support a record Palestinians had already built with their blood, photographs and names.

Israel Turned on the Filmmakers

NAZA received a 25-minute ovation at the Venice Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize. However, Israel’s leadership responded with fury.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the documentary antisemitic incitement. Their military chief Eyal Zamir accused it of falsehoods and directed military lawyers to examine possible action. Culture Minister Miki Zohar asked officials to consider stripping Abraham and Szor of their citizenship for alleged disloyalty.

This is not Antisemitism but evidence of Israeli crimes against Palestinians. The response also shows why insider testimony is dangerous. Palestinian witnesses are routinely dismissed as hostile. Israeli officers describing the same system are harder to silence.

Testimony Must Become Accountability

NAZA has broken through part of Israel’s machinery of denial. It presents insiders describing a system in which Palestinian families could be counted before they were killed.

Although a documentary cannot stop the next airstrike, its evidence must lead to independent investigations, an end to military support and accountability for those who designed, approved and protected the system.

Otherwise, NAZA will remain more than a film title. It will remain the cold number placed beside another Palestinian home.

Every September 11, families gather at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville to remember 2,977 innocent souls. Their names deserve to be read. Their relatives deserve sympathy, and the crime that took their lives must never be excused.

But remembrance becomes incomplete when it ends there. The United States answered the attack with a military campaign that crossed borders and outlived presidents. Though Muslims were not responsible for 9/11, their families abroad and at home have carried the heaviest consequences of the response for twenty-five years.

One Attack Became Permission for Endless War

The invasion of Afghanistan began less than a month after 9/11. What was presented as a mission against terrorist groups soon became a wider project of occupation and political reconstruction.

The government of Iraq did not carry out the September 11 attacks. Even the 9/11 Commission found no evidence of a collaborative operational relationship between Iraq and terrorist groups. Even so, fear helped the then US administration sell an invasion built around weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

Eventually, the “War on Terror” reached Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Libya and the Philippines through airstrikes, raids and proxy forces. It had no fixed battlefield or clear definition of victory. That made it convenient to expand and almost impossible to end.

The Dead Are Counted in Millions

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that post-9/11 wars caused at least 4.5 to 4.7 million deaths. Only part of that total came directly from bombs, bullets, and battlefield violence.

Researchers estimate that 3.6 to 3.8 million people died indirectly. War destroyed hospitals, water systems, farms, and local economies. Children died from malnutrition, patients lost treatment, while families faced disease after sanitation systems collapsed.

Although these figures include people of different faiths, the principal battlegrounds were Muslim-majority countries. Therefore, Muslims bore a vastly disproportionate share of the devastation.

Thirty-Eight Million Muslims Were Driven From Home

An estimated 38 million people were displaced by post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.

Some crossed borders and became refugees. Others moved repeatedly as front lines changed. Resultantly, children grew up in camps, and families lost their homes, farmland and livelihoods.

Additionally, Western governments later treated this displacement as a separate migration problem. Many refugees arriving at foreign borders were escaping wars, armed groups, and institutional collapse created or intensified by military intervention.

The Same Language Is Being Used in Gaza

The War on Terror never truly disappeared. Its language now helps Israel defend its genocide in Gaza.

As a result of a Carte blanche to Israel, Palestinians are reduced to “human shields,” homes become “terrorist infrastructure,” and children killed in airstrikes become “collateral damage.” Such terms make civilian deaths appear unavoidable before independent investigators can establish what happened.

Unfortunately, Washington supplies the required backing behind that language. From October 2023 to September 2025, the United States spent $21.7 billion on military assistance to Israel. Moreover, it spent another $9.65 to $12.07 billion on related operations across the wider Middle East.

Though the weapons and leaders have changed since 2001, the permission remains familiar: declare an unlimited fight against terrorism, remove civilians from the centre of the story, and dismiss accountability as support for the enemy.

Muslim Life in the World Came Under Suspicion

The War on Terror also created an internal enemy. Religious practice, immigration history, and political speech became reasons to watch Muslims who had committed no crime.

Under the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, more than 80,000 men from predominantly Muslim countries had to register with immigration authorities in the United States. Unfortunately, more than 13,000 faced deportation proceedings after complying. The programme produced no terrorism-related convictions.

Moreover, the New York Police Department mapped Muslim neighbourhoods, monitored student groups and sent informants into mosques. Its surveillance reached every mosque within 100 miles of New York. Worshippers began wondering whether newcomers had come to pray or record them.

That suspicion has not disappeared. CAIR received 8,683 civil-rights complaints in 2025 alone, its highest annual number since recording began in 1996. These were complaints rather than court-proven hate crimes, but their scale remains significant.

A 2026 Pew Research Center study found that 59 percent of American Muslims believe Muslims face extensive discrimination. The same percentage said television and films portray them unfairly. Only 34 percent recalled receiving support because of their religion during the previous year.

In a nutshell, remembering September 11 should mean refusing to repeat its horror: the deliberate destruction of innocent life. Those innocent souls killed that day were not a license to invade unrelated countries, torture prisoners, surveil mosques, or punish Muslim families across generations. Twenty-five years later, the War on Terror must be judged not by the fear that launched it, but by the millions of lives it took apart.