INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY FIELD

Armed hostilities in the Gaza Strip following 7 October 2023 produced a humanitarian and legal crisis without modern parallel. Within 365 square kilometer’s, approximately 1.9 million Palestinians roughly 90 percent of the total population were displaced at peak intensity, many repeatedly, across a shrinking and heavily militarized landscape from which external flight was structurally impossible. This paper introduces the concept of compound displacement to describe iterative, spatially constrained displacement that erases the conventional distinction between refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) and overwhelms the institutional architecture designed to manage both. Drawing on UNRWA situation reports, OCHA field data, human rights documentation, and relevant instruments of international humanitarian and refugee law, the paper argues that the Palestinian case in Gaza exposes fundamental structural inadequacies in the protracted refugee framework (PRF). Palestinians in Gaza constitute a uniquely hybrid category: registered refugees whose displacement traces to 1948, IDPs within a non-sovereign and besieged territory, and subjects of ongoing active displacement operations simultaneously. The PRF’s core assumptions stasis, externality, and eventual resolution through durable solutions fail when applied to this context. The paper calls for a paradigmatic reconsideration of displacement law and proposes supplementary conceptual tools: layered refugeehood, coercive containment, and architectural displacement.