CAIRO — On April 5, Sanaa Mohammed, a Palestinian university professor, traveled from Gaza to Egypt via the Rafah border crossing to receive treatment for breast cancer in the Beheira Governorate on the Mediterranean coast. Four of her seven children — three minors and a 28-year-old — accompanied her. While her husband and other three children stayed behind in Gaza.
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“We had were eight children; one of them was killed last December,” she said. “He was studying to be a butcher, and volunteered to rescue wounded people. He died along with my nephew. We didn’t find their remains. They were only identified through the leg of one of them.”
Mohammed never imagined leaving Gaza, and leaving half of her family behind. Her husband and her 24-year-old son Mohammed are in northern Gaza, while her son Musab was displaced to the central city of Deir al-Balah he was injured. Her daughter Sundus is sheltering in a tent in the southern city of Khan Younis along with her husband and their three children.
“My heart is divided. I can’t sleep or eat,” Mohammed said, adding that she is always concerned about the safety of her family back in the war-torn strip, especially her injured son.
“My blood pressure is always high,” she said.
Mohammed’s family is not the only family that has been torn apart by the Israeli-Hamas war and it’s not clear when they will be reunited again. She still hopes to be united with her family. But until this happens, she has no option but to look for a job to feed her children in their forced exile. She has appealed to the Red Cross to help unite her family and to help cover her treatment and lodging expenses.
“I am no longer able to bear the responsibility on my own,” she said.
A fateful trip
Since Israel occupied and closed off the Rafah border crossing in May, Nasser Atallah has not been able to see his children and wife.
A writer, Atallah left Gaza to attend a writing conference in Syria before the war. After the conference, he spent a few days with his relatives in Syria whom he had not seen for 20 years. That’s when the war broke out. He tried to return to Cairo and head directly to Gaza to be with wife and children in Khan Younis. But he could not because the Damascus airport was bombed. He returned to Cairo on Nov. 11, 2023.
I die of anxiety.
“Things were difficult and complicated. My wife and children asked me to stay here, in Egypt,” he said. He tried to get his family out of Gaza, but his hopes were dashed with the occupation of the Rafah crossing.
Atallah lives in a room with a Palestinian family in Cairo’s Ain Shams neighborhood. He anxiously follows news of the war, and communicates constantly with his wife and children in the Palestinian enclave.
“When communications are cut off, I die of anxiety. I can’t eat or drink. I have nothing but the news to watch,” he said. “My wife and six children are always displaced and moved amid the relentless bombing. “It is difficult to bear all of this at the same time.”
A son’s treatment
Nadireen al-Gharabli also arrived in Egypt just a day before Israel’s occupation of the Rafah crossing. Accompanied by her four sons and two daughters, she she traveled there to treat her 4-year-old, who suffers from heart and brain diseases. Her husband remained at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
But al-Gharabli cannot afford the costly treatment, which includes surgeries, physical therapy and speech therapy sessions. “There is no institution that covers the treatment, and my husband cannot come to Egypt because of the crossing is closed,” she said, adding “even if the crossing opens, we do not have the money to pay for the exit coordination to get out.”
The “coordination” is a border fee service operated by Hala Consulting and Tourism, an Egyptian firm with links to Egyptian security agencies. It offered crucial services for those aiming to leave Gaza through the Rafah crossing before its closure in May.
My heart is broken, and I can no longer comprehend what is happening.
These services include registering names on the Egyptian list of travelers approved for entry from Gaza, and operating transportation from the border to Cairo. It cost ,000 per adult and ,500 per child, according to Palestinians who already left Gaza. That was up from several hundred dollars before the war.
In July, the United Nations reported that about 110,000 people had left Gaza to Egypt through the Rafah crossing. Many stayed in Egypt, but others left for other destinations.
Left behind
Al-Gharabli is also suffering from the woes of being away from home. Her father was killed while she has been in Egypt.
“My heart is broken, and I can no longer comprehend what is happening,” she said. “It is as if it is a long nightmare from which we do not know when we will wake up.”
Al-Gharabli’s husband, Khaled Ibrahim, is sheltering in Deir al-Balah along with his brother and mother in a building under construction. Communicating via WhatsApp, he said that one of his friends mediated his son’s evacuation for treatment in Egypt. “I tried to leave with them, but unfortunately I could not,” he said.
Originally from northern Gaza, Ibrahim had owned a clothing store. When the war broke out, he fled southward, and Israeli forces burnt down his store, he said. “I lost everything. I tried to protect my wife and children and keep them away from danger.”
