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‘What are we here for? Money!’High-school graduate Jojo said she was working as a maid in Kampala, Uganda, when she received a message on the Telegram messaging app about an opportunity in Asia that involved being sponsored to do computer studies as part of a job in IT.
“I was so excited,” Jojo recounted, “I told my mum about the offer.”Jojo told how she was sent an airline ticket, and described how multiple people met her along the way as she journeyed from Kampala to Laos. Eventually Jojo arrived in the same scam operation as Khobby.She described an atmosphere similar to a fast-paced sales centre, with Chinese bosses shouting encouragement when a victim had been ‘butchered’ and their money stolen, telling how she witnessed people scammed for as much as $200,000.
“They would shout a lot, in Chinese – ‘What are we here for? Money!’”On top of adrenaline, the scam operation also ran on fear, Jojo said.
Workers were beaten if they did not meet targets for swindling money. Mostly locked inside the building where she worked and lived; Jojo said she was only able to leave the scam operation once in the four months she was in the GTSEZ, and that was to attend a local hospital after falling ill.
Fear of the Chinese bosses who ran the operation not only permeated their workstations but in the dormitory where they slept.“They say the reason why [Israeli officials] did this, the reason why they established these distribution points only in the south is that they want to encourage people — or even force them — to flee from the north,” Vall explained.
The fear remains, he said, that moving Palestinians southwards could be a “preliminary phase for the complete ousting” of Gaza’s population.According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least 54,056 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, which humanitarian aid groups and United Nations experts have
compared to a genocideHere are some scenes from Tuesday’s aid distribution efforts.