Highlights Potential risk scenarios associated with COVID19 and their expected development in Gaza. Local context related to blockade and siege imposed in Gaza and how it is impacted by COVID19. Protective measurements taken by local authorities and their significance. Recommendations to improve and sustain control measures to prevent COVID19 widespread in Gaza.

This article confronts the assumption that when irregular migration takes place in a context deemed to be terrorist, the two converge. The analysis is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork with young people engaged in the process of irregular migration from the Gaza Strip in occupied Palestine – a place often described as the largest open-air prison in the world. By analysing the process through which young people “coordinate” their movement out of Gaza, and their primary motivations for doing so, the article disrupts the idea of an incumbent criminal convergence of terrorism, irregular migration and human smuggling. It contributes to the growing literature which argues that, rather than operating with or through organized terrorist or criminal networks, the facilitation of irregular migration draws on improvised praxis. In the case of Gaza, it is also undertaken by youth in protest of the status quo of over twelve years of Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza strip, and the rule of the Hamas authority throughout this period. By attending to the experiences of youth in Gaza, the article explains the layers of economic and political agency that enable mobility in what is typically considered to be a highly immobile context.

This article ethnographically explores ways that young Palestinian refugees seek to strengthen their claims to residency in Jerusalem. It describes the complex layers of colonial subjugation faced by these young people and the ways they attune their everyday life choices in this context of long-term insecurity. I argue that through situations forced upon them in efforts by the Israeli government to reduce the Palestinian demographic of the city, young people are re-making the categories they live under, away from their bureaucratic and assumed political meaning. This article explores different examples of engagement with Israeli state institutions as tactics undertaken to mitigate the increasing uncertainty surrounding residency revocation and subsequent forcible transfer of Palestinians from Jerusalem. I argue that the reason young people are re-attributing meaning of these categories is to safeguard their futures, in light of the failure of international frameworks to do the same.