The first few hundred dual citizens, foreigners and their families, as well as Palestinian staff members of international organisations, were able to leave Gaza on Wednesday through its border with Egypt. Photo / Samar Abu Elouf, The New York Times
“You feel that human beings’ lives are so worthless,” said Ala Al Husseini, 61, an Austrian-Palestinian dual national who was allowed to leave Gaza on Wednesday.
There was little gas and no phone service in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday morning, making it impossible to hail a cab, so Ala Al Husseini nearly missed his chance to escape the war.
When someone eventually agreed to give him a ride to the border crossing with Egypt, where he could use his Austrian passport to leave Gaza, he and the driver crept through the grey, shattered streets in a state of icy dread, wondering if they could be killed in an airstrike simply for passing what Israel might consider a military target — just two more pieces of collateral damage.
As if watching a film, he pictured his children, his Ph.D., his university teaching work, his wife.
“I was thinking this could all go away just by someone pressing a button of an F-16,” said Al Husseini, 61.
Instead, by the next morning, he was safe in Cairo, hugging his brother.
“There were lots of tears,” he said by phone Thursday, the day before he was supposed to fly to Austria to reunite with his wife and children. “Getting out of a war zone is something like a new life.”
Al Husseini was among the first few hundred people to leave Gaza since the war erupted a month ago, all of them saved by their foreign passports or other legal ties to the outside world. Weeks of intensive negotiations among Israel, Egypt, the United States, Hamas and Qatar, which often acts as a diplomatic intermediary for Hamas, had yielded an agreement for the dual citizens, foreigners and their families, as well as Palestinian staff members of international organisations, to leave Gaza through its border with Egypt.
But reaching safety was hardly as simple as showing up at the border, foreign passport in hand, as several evacuees described in interviews with The New York Times.
Some of the would-be evacuees went repeatedly to the Rafah crossing over the last three weeks after hearing it might open, only to find the gate shut. Rumours and confusion abounded as news spread that the crossing was open this week, prompting many people to head there even though they were not yet scheduled to depart. The lack of internet and spotty phone connections meant some people might not even have heard that they were on the list to leave.
On the appointed day, the evacuees first had to find a car with enough gas to travel — and a driver with enough nerve to take them. Then there was the ride to the border, then the long line of people, all quietly impatient, followed by hours of waiting in the departures hall of the border crossing.
Next came the nerve-wracking moment where officials checked travel documents against a list of names compiled by foreign embassies and approved by Israel, Egypt and Hamas. Then the bus ride from the Palestinian side to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, followed by more waiting and more document-checking in the arrivals hall.
Finally, they emerged through a dun-coloured archway with an Egyptian flag rippling over it, and they were in Egypt — safe. Safe, after more than three weeks in which every day they had thought that they might die.
“In Egypt now. Free!” Ramona Okumura, a Seattle resident who was volunteering in Gaza for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund when the war broke out, texted a Times journalist on Wednesday evening.
About 340 dual nationals from Bulgaria, Finland, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan and elsewhere, as well as employees from around the world of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and other aid groups, crossed on Wednesday. Another group of about 340 people, among them more than 100 Americans, crossed on Thursday.
So much depended on the bureaucratic minutiae of passports and visas, on the long, unwieldy list that determined whether someone could cross — and, perhaps, whether she or he would survive.
Dalal Abu Middain, an American citizen, and her family turned back on Thursday because crossing would have meant leaving her 6-year-old daughter, Maha, who was rejected from crossing, despite having US citizenship.
Abdallah Dahalaan, 76, an Australian dual citizen, chose to stay in Gaza because his wife, Samah, was not on the list.
“She said, ‘Just go, and then we’ll see what happens after.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not going,’” Dahalaan said by phone Wednesday. “Imagine leaving your partner behind. It’s just — it’s not the right thing to do.”
So they rejoined the more than 2 million people who remain trapped in Gaza, those with no prospect of escaping the hunger, thirst or Israeli bombardment they have endured since October 7. That was when the decades-old conflict exploded again with an attack on Israel by the armed Palestinian group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 people. In response, the Israeli military launched an all-out campaign against Gaza.
Al Husseini’s 84-year-old mother and his brother’s children could not leave, either.
In Gaza, “you feel that human beings’ lives are so worthless,” Al Husseini said. Most Palestinians in Gaza, he said, are “not Hamas — they are normal people who have their own lives. They work in banks and companies and live normal lives, and now these lives are completely shattered.”
Weeks of Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 9,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, among them multiple dual citizens hoping to leave. On Thursday morning, the sound of a nearby airstrike rattled the people waiting to cross at Rafah, and a piece of shrapnel appeared to fall on the metal canopy of the terminal area.
Israel’s siege of Gaza is preventing fuel from entering the enclave, as well as limiting water and food access to aid shipments that fall far short of the population’s basic needs.
Daily life in Gaza has withered to an endless, humiliating quest for the essentials.
Every day, “I have one son waiting in the bakery line, the other one in the water line and the third in the cellphone charging line,” said Rania Abunahla, 43, a Jordanian dual citizen hoping to cross on Wednesday. “When the shelling starts, I don’t know who I should check on first.”
On Wednesday and Thursday morning, some evacuees arrived by foot, others by donkey cart, lugging all the baggage they could. Then they crowded in to wait. The mood was tense, edging toward relief.
Halfway around the world in Colorado, three weeks of agony were coming to an end for Danny Preston. His mother, Dr Barbara Zind, a Colorado paediatrician, was volunteering with the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund when the war erupted.
When she heard the border might open for foreigners weeks ago, Zind, 68, was so optimistic about leaving that she gave away much of her clothing to others who needed it more. She spent the rest of her time in Gaza sleeping in jeans in the basement of a UN building, the parking lot of a UN school and the kindergarten playroom of another building, her son said.
He said her group had come close to running out of food and water twice before being resupplied — the first time by a Nigerian team from Mercy Corps, the second by a member of her group who volunteered to make the dangerous drive to northern Gaza to get more provisions after the rations had dwindled to about 900 calories per person, per day.
On Tuesday night, she and her group of fellow volunteers heard from the State Department that they should head to the border by 7 a.m. This time, it felt real.
It helped that they could see things happening by midmorning. Ambulances were transporting critically injured Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt for treatment. Officials were scanning documents.
Roughly seven hours later, she was through, getting in a car bound for Cairo.
“So tired,” Zind texted her son on Wednesday night from the Egyptian side of the crossing. “Didn’t eat all day until I got a Coke and chips” while waiting to be processed there, she added, joking: “Will have to detox when I get home.”
Preston said his mother regularly volunteers in Gaza, the West Bank and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. When he asked her how she felt about leaving Gaza behind at a time of great need, she responded that her work — treating chronically ill children — was now impossible, given the shortages of everything from food to fuel to medicine.
But she was already planning to come back to Gaza when she could.
“I know that this is what she does, and I’m really proud of her for it,” he said. “And I don’t know if I would be able to talk her out of it.”
Like Zind, Abunahla, the Jordanian dual citizen, spent hours waiting at the crossing on Wednesday. Then she learned that her three sons, ages 14, 20 and 22, were not on the list with her, assurances from Jordan’s foreign ministry notwithstanding.
Her husband had already chosen to stay in Gaza to take care of his parents. She could not face breaking her family up further.
“Everybody was telling me to leave, but how? How can I leave my sons behind?” she said, dazed from her sudden descent from hope into despair. “I’ve lost the chance to leave. It looks like I’m staying here.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vivian Yee and Emma Bubola
Photographs by: Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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