A new humanitarian outrage is unfolding in the Middle East. It’s not in Gaza

A young girl holds a broken doll among newly arrived Afghan returnees at a border crossing with Iran on July 4. Photo by Muhammad Balabuluki/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman July 24, 2025

It’s easy to look at what is happening to Afghans living in Iran and conclude that, in our world, some deportations are worse than others; some refugees matter more than others; some hungry people deserve aid more than others; and some persecuted women require our attention while others … not so much.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited President Donald Trump at the White House earlier this month, he faced international condemnation for renewing Trump’s call to resettle Gaza’s 2 million residents outside the battered enclave.

I understand and agree with the criticism. It’s a war crime to forcibly exile a civilian population.

But what I don’t understand is how that same criticism has appeared to entirely bypass Iran, which — on the very same day that Netanyahu met with Trump — ramped up efforts to expel Afghans living within its borders to as many as 50,000 each day. This year, Iran has uprooted around 1.5 million Afghans from their lives, stripped them of their belongings, and sent them back to Afghanistan to face hunger, poverty, political persecution and, in the case of Afghan women and girls, the end of their education and rights.

“Afghanistan has faded from headlines,” the writer and activist Homeira Qaderi told me in an email, “but that does not mean the suffering has stopped. It is a humanitarian emergency that deserves far more international focus than it is currently receiving.”

That attention amounts, in the English-speaking world, to a handful of articles. No campus protests, no incessant social media posts, no major grassroots efforts to raise awareness, and certainly no Greta Thunberg-approved missions to sweltering, overcrowded border camps.

So: How is Iran managing to quietly carry out what a Turkish broadcaster called “one of the largest mass expulsions in human history?”

Simple: by doing it while the world is fixated on Israel and Gaza.

The humanitarian crisis Iran is perpetrating, to be clear, does not erase or excuse Israel’s actions in Gaza, or Hamas’. But it should raise questions for the international community about its all-consuming focus on Israel — not least because Iran is justifying the expulsion by blaming Israel.

Until recently, about 3.8 million Afghans lived in Iran, having fled instability, persecution and war in their home country. Most live without documentation and lack any legal protections. Many have been in Iran for decades, and many more were born there to refugee parents.

“Afghans have entrenched lives there, like many undocumented people in the United States,” said Arash Azizzada, a filmmaker and founder of the group Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, “but they also face severe discrimination, racism, bigotry, religious persecution, and are second-class citizens.”

Following Israel’s June strikes on Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, the Iranian government began accusing Afghans of working for the Mossad — turning the attack into an excuse to expel a group of immigrants whom Iranian leaders and state media had long demonized.

Videos circulating online show Iranians attacking Afghans in the streets.

“The Iranian government has been able to use the Afghan refugee community as an easy scapegoat,” said Azizzada.

In Afghanistan, the refugees have been concentrated in border camps, where they lack food and water. The extremist Islamic Taliban, which now controls Afghanistan, has failed to provide basic human services — perhaps in part because the group has led the country into economic freefall — and international aid has not kept up with the expanding need.

“It is not a homecoming,” Sami Yousafzai, who runs the Instagram account The Afghan Affairs, emailed me, “but an exile to an uncertain and hostile place.”

In one post, Yousafzai documented the story of an Afghan woman who gave birth in the overcrowded ​​Al Ghadir camp in Zahedan, only to watch her baby die before medical aid could arrive.

Afghan women face the greatest hardship, forced to return to a country that denies education, work and basic human rights to girls and women.

“These women are being sent back to a country where their existence is increasingly erased from public life,” said Qaderi, whose exquisite 2020 memoir, Dancing in the Mosque, recounted her flight from Taliban oppression. “The economic hardship facing Afghan men is undeniable. But for women, the crisis is not just economic — it is cultural, social, and existential.”

The Afghans I spoke with agreed that NGOs, politicians, the media and the public are not paying enough attention — if any — to this crisis.

Part of the reason is surely the American desire to wash its hands of Afghanistan, where 2,159 U.S. military personnel were killed in the 20-year war that followed the 9/11 terror attack on New York City. In the course of the war, many Afghan civilians helped U.S. troops and civilian rebuilding efforts. (At least 46,319 civilians were killed during the war.)

“It’s been very convenient for Americans to turn away from the Iranian government committing this mass human rights violation and say, that has nothing to do with me,” said Azzizada. “But the reality is, the United States also has a responsibility here.”

But it’s also impossible to overstate how much attention Israel and its war in Gaza has sucked from this situation. As I sought information on the refugees, I found that even the social media feeds of Afghan activists were given over to images of Palestinian suffering in Gaza — with no apparent mention of the plight faced by their own refugee countrymen.

On his X and Instagram feeds, for instance, Khaled Hosseini, author of the best-selling novel The Kite Runner and arguably the most prominent Afghan-American, has yet to post about the current expulsion. The majority of his posts call for humanitarian intervention in Gaza.

All this isn’t to deflect from Gaza, where horrors, including escalating starvation, continue to multiply. It’s to ask why, in the eyes of the world, Afghan lives appear to matter so much less.

There are simple actions that could help. People could bring more attention to the crisis, urge their leaders and the international community to pour in more aid, give aid to Afghan refugees and advocate for more generous U.S. refugee policies for Afghans — admittedly, a tough battle given the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants here.

“Afghanistan is a land full of people who want progress,” Qaderi wrote to me. “Its citizens — especially the younger generation — dream of education, freedom, and growth. But as long as the Taliban remains unchecked, and the world chooses silence or pragmatism over justice, those dreams will remain distant.”