Patients and internally displaced Palestinians seek refuge at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, when the medical center was functioning half-way, amid the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza in November 2023. (Photo by AFP)

Gaza City, February 17 (RHC)-- The Israeli regime has been “sneakily” conducting ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip by forcing medically evacuated Palestinians to sign documents relinquishing their right to return to their homeland.

Taleed El-Sabawi, an assistant professor of law at Wayne State University, made the revelation in a thread of posts on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday.  “We have confirmed with multiple patient reports that in the last 1-2 weeks the Israeli regime has unilaterally & sneakily begun forcing patients who medically evacuating from Gaza to sign paperwork at the exiting checkpoints saying they cannot return to Gaza,” Sabawi said.

“None of the NGOs helping with the coordination of the medical evacs were informed by the entity or any governing body this would happen,” she added.

Condemning the Israeli regime’s move, Sabawi said, “This violates international law and given the document was signed under duress it is unenforceable—meaning it is not worth the paper it was signed on.”

Underlining that the forced evacuation should “stop as quickly as it started,” Sabawi added, “Israel thinks we aren’t paying attention, but we are. Pressure is needed on Israel to stop this illegal & sneaky practice.”

The Israeli regime unleashed a genocidal war against the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.  The Israeli military has so far killed over 48,000 Palestinians, most of them children and women, and forcibly displaced almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million population.

On January 15th, the Israeli regime, having failed to achieve any of its war objectives including the “elimination” of Hamas or the release of captives, was forced to agree to a ceasefire deal with the Gaza-based resistance movement.