Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!

 Someone’s going to do the cartoon with Bibi as Davros and the Israeli Dalek Forces screaming “Evacuate!” I can’t draw, so it won’t be me. 

There’s something like 1.2 million people in Rafah now. The thing people have been saying to this ludicrous notion of evacuating Rafah is that there is nowhere left to go. Because there is nowhere left to go. But here’s some other things to consider. 

Evacuating a million people is not easy. Like, crazy not easy. Hurricane Katrina resulted in a million people being evacuated - and that was a fiasco. Over a thousand people died. But - it could have been a lot worse. Heckuva job Broenie may have dropped the ball and W might have been too busy with birthday cakes to engage, but there was a response and people did mobilize to help. That’s not happening in Gaza. Also, evacuees had the ability to evacuate. Not only did they have places to go, but they also had fuel and vehicles to get there. Those things are also not true of Gaza. Also, the population of Rafah has been starved for an extended period. Disease and malnutrition are rampant. Civil order is mostly broken.  Civilian infrastructure has been bombed into uselessness. An evacuation of Rafah is going to make the government response to Katrina 

Here’s another mass evacuation that’s happened since Katrina - Fukushima Prefecture. Something like 200,000 people had to be evacuated. It took several days. 2,000 people died in the evacuation. Now the population of Fukushima is much older and thus less resilient to shocks like this. But the population of Gaza has had most of their resiliency already used up. A 1% death toll might actually be the type of thing we might expect from a forced evacuation of Rafah. That would be over ten thousand people. And again - this was somewhere with existing services and agencies and equipment and vehicles with fuel and food and clean water. Maybe that 1% rate is optimistic. 

So this idea that evacuating Rafah is going to protect civilians from mass casualty events in the ground invasion - well, the evacuation itself would be a massive mass casualty event.