Palestinian patients being evacuated to the United Arab Emirates out of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, July 28^th. Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP

Almost 2 million Palestinians have been displaced in Israel’s year-long onslaught on the Gaza Strip, which tell us is a genocide. Many have sought refuge in the sprawling tent cities that now snake across Gaza—new refugee camps atop old ones. Others live in the overcrowded buildings that have not yet been turned to rubble in Israel’s unprecedented campaign of domicide. However, before Israel invaded Rafah in May and essentially shuttered the last remaining crossing out of Gaza, a minority of around 150,000 people managed to leave the enclave, either because they had the “right” documents—second passports and hard-to-come-by visas—or because they were able to pay exorbitant fees to Hala, the private company that controls the commercial crossing into Egypt, and that has raked in more than $1 billion over the past year from Palestinians fleeing death.

As the dispatches collected below show, those who have left have not done it lightly, knowing from their own history that temporary displacement of Palestinians has a tendency to ossify into permanent exile. Yet the earth-shattering conditions in Gaza have forced them to try and save themselves and the few loved ones they can, at the cost of almost everything else: their homes and homeland, other family and friends, their life savings. For members of the new Palestinian diasporas that have stemmed from these forced migrations, watching the live-streamed genocide thus becomes a constant reliving of their own trauma, and a reckoning with the traumas of those they left behind. Further, while leaving Gaza provides desperately needed respite from violence, it comes with new problems, especially for Palestinian refugees in Egypt who lack the right to work, education, or healthcare. Those who have citizenship or networks in their host countries fare better, but are still often forced to live under governments and amidst societies abetting the destruction of their own people.

Jewish Currents spoke to four Palestinians who have been pushed out of Gaza in the past year: Zak Hania, who spoke to the magazine in February for our Rafah dispatches and who was separated from his family for almost nine months after he was arbitrarily prevented from leaving by Israel; Safa and Amal Al-Majdalawi, two sisters who made it to limbo in Cairo after their brother paid for their way out; and Mohammed Ghalayini, a British Palestinian scientist whose new life in the Gaza Strip was violently halted in its tracks. The interviewees describe the horrors they fled but cannot escape, the impossible choices they had to make in the process of leaving, and the halting process of trying to rebuild themselves from the rubble. These dispatches have been edited for length and clarity.

“I read in their eyes that they felt that this might be the last time I would see them.”

I remember the night we decided to leave our home in northern Gaza. It was November 2023, and Israel carried out what is known as a “fire belt” strike on our road in the Al-Shati camp, felling several two- and three-story buildings. I have neighbors who are still trapped under the rubble from those bombings. We had never had a night like this, and we were shocked that we saw the light of day again. Given our experience and stories of the Nakba, we know that if we were to leave, we may never see our homes again. But it felt like a decision between life and death. If I wasn’t with my family, I might have made a different decision, but I had to think about them first. So starting on that horrible night, we were on the move. We went to the home of one of my nieces, then another, and then we made the very intense journey along Salah al-Din Road to Khan Younis. We began by donkey, and then we had to dismount and go by foot with the thousands of others heading south. I was with my wife, four sons, and around 20 others from my extended family, including several young children.

I know Gaza very well, but there was so much destruction all around me that I couldn’t even recognize where I was. The landmarks that I would use to orient myself were gone. It felt like the Day of Judgement. There were sounds of gunshots in the air, and corpses on the side of the road. At the Netzarim checkpoint, there were tanks and snipers all around us. There was an old man who could barely walk who collapsed on the ground, and the Israeli army called from the speaker for him to get up. I didn’t help him, and I don’t even recall what happened to him. I feel terrible that I didn’t do anything, but I was so scared and overwhelmed, and I had to try to keep it together for everybody else in my family.

By the time we got to Khan Younis, we had decided to leave the Gaza Strip because we are lucky enough to hold Irish citizenship. That same month, in November, we managed to get my wife and sons on the list to leave, but unfortunately my name was blocked. I was never given a reason for being denied exit. My wife was reluctant to leave me, but my brother helped me to convince her by saying that her leaving with the four boys would free up food, water, and space in the crowded flat we were sheltering in. So they left, with the idea that I would be able to follow soon. But after a few months of unsuccessful efforts by Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and by various NGOs, I realized that I needed to raise enough money on my own to pay my way out. I hated having to start a GoFundMe page for what felt like it should be a basic human right. It felt like ransom money, but I ultimately did it. I raised enough money to get out, and in May, my wife returned to Cairo to register me with Hala.

By then, I had been living with my two older sisters and their children and grandchildren for months, and even though they encouraged me to leave and told me that my children needed me, I couldn’t help but feel a lot of guilt, knowing that I would be crossing to safety and that they would be left behind to endure very difficult conditions. It was a very emotional scene, we were all crying. I read in their eyes that they felt that this might be the last time I would see them.

I hadn’t realized how much I had grown accustomed to all the violence in Gaza. Only once I got to the Egyptian side of the border did I realize how tense I had been. When I went past the crossing to get the bus to Cairo, without the sounds of bombing or drones, I felt safe for the first time in months. But when I got to the city, I felt outside of myself, like I was not really there. Like I was watching a film, but I was actually still in Gaza. I felt a sort of blackout in my brain. It’s strange to admit, but I didn’t feel excited to be reunited with my family. It felt good to hug my children at the airport again—and I could tell they were so relieved—but I just felt numb. Now, months later, I feel better, but it still doesn’t feel possible to have a normal life. We have survived physically, but mentally I am not so sure. Back in Dublin, I remain very tense. I have not been able to work or focus on anything at all. If I ever have to do two or three things at once, I suddenly feel immense stress. I am lucky to be in Ireland, where I have so many kind and understanding friends, and more generally, the Irish are very supportive of Palestine, but my faith in humanity has been shaken forever. I don’t know how humans can do this to another; I cannot come to terms with it.

My family has been separated: some in the north, some in the south, some abroad, and some have been killed. We never had a time and space to mourn together, and to allow us to heal. I keep remembering a day from exactly a year ago, when I went to Al-Shifa Hospital to do some reporting for a Swiss magazine. There had been very heavy bombardment and the hospital couldn’t keep up. The morgue was beyond capacity, so they had set up a tent outside the reception to take in the overflowing corpses. I was filming and I decided to go inside. I saw the bodies of children completely dismembered. And the smell. I wanted to scream. I learned that many of the cameramen had been filming in the morning and simply couldn’t handle it anymore. I saw one of them and he looked like he had a nervous breakdown. He was like a dead body as well. As a genocide survivor, I relive these experiences every time I see images coming out of Gaza. I see the faces on the screen, and I am taken back to what I was feeling at that time. It’s hard to think ahead in these conditions: It is impossible to plan for tomorrow, and the future is hiding from us.

— Zak Hania, as told to Jonathan Shamir on October 7^th.

“Watching [y]our people get killed from afar . . . does something terrible to your soul.”

It was always worse at night. Every time the sun would set, we had this dreadful feeling. We would go to an UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] school in Jabalia that was serving as a shelter for civilians, and we would hear the bombings. We would return to our home during the day, hoping that our house was still standing. When the bombs got closer, we decided to head south, but the bombing was no less intense there. In December, when we were in the south, we learned that our father’s and our uncle’s houses were destroyed in airstrikes that killed 23 members of our family. It took us weeks to get information that our father was alive. We kept calling his phone but we didn’t get through; it was by coincidence that our brother saw our father in the back of an Al Jazeera broadcast.

I [Safa] was born in the house that was bombed. My bed, books, pictures—everything was gone. It seems little in the grand scheme of all these massacres, but I feel so sad about my tatriz dress. My mother gave it to me before she died, and she had got it from her own mother from [the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of] Simsim before the Nakba. When I packed my bags, it never crossed my mind to take it. I want my mother to forgive me.

In January, we called our brother Mohammad to see if he could arrange to get us out. He was living in Sweden at the time, and flew to Egypt in order to get us registered with Hala. [Only a first-degree relative can register people to leave.] It cost $5,000 per person, and Mohammad could only afford to pay for three of us. This meant that the family had to have an internal discussion about who would leave. Our father and brother refused, and in the end, we decided that the sisters—Amal, Safa, and Amani—would leave. At that time, we still had some hope that the war would end. We told ourselves that it is just a trip, and not exile. I [Amal] told my son it would be three months maximum; since then, I haven’t been able to sleep at night. We felt like we were betraying our family, and we did not feel lucky. While it’s true that we are not under the threat of being killed, or displaced again and again, we are stuck watching our people get killed from afar, and that does something terrible to your soul.

When we first arrived in Cairo, we were so tired that we barely left the house. We had been sleeping in tents, so when we finally had a bed, we just slept for the first week. As we started to go outside, we came across so many people from Gaza at restaurants and cafes, and we realized that there is a new Palestinian diaspora in Cairo. But there’s a sense of sadness when we meet them, as you realize that your own story is just one of thousands. Every Palestinian from Gaza has their own heartbreak.

There are some aspects of life in Egypt that are good. We have food and water, and we are not in immediate danger anymore; the people speak the same language, and are generally warm toward Palestinians. But we do not have permission to work, and we don’t have a sense of purpose anymore. Many Palestinians have spent their savings to get out of Gaza, and very few have managed to re-establish themselves in Egypt. We are lucky that we have Mohammad, who is supporting us. He left behind his life in Sweden, and he does some freelance work as a researcher and filmmaker. But rent and food is very expensive in Cairo in comparison to what it was in Gaza. The displaced Palestinian children are not allowed to attend Egyptian schools, so they are either receiving their education online or for a very high fee. The same goes for healthcare—as Palestinian refugees, we would have to pay exorbitant fees, which means we are scared of getting ill. At the same time, our family in Gaza has even less than us, so they also expect us to try and get money for them. It’s an impossible situation.

It’s not clear what will happen next, and you cannot return to the past either. This means you end up watching the news all day, which is not good for us mentally. It ends up just being a better sort of prison. Through it all, one of the worst things has been learning that the world doesn’t see us as human beings. Even though we are safe in Egypt, we don’t feel safe in this world anymore. We are scared of everything. We are scared of the future.

— Safa and Amal Al-Majdalawi, as told to Jonathan Shamir on October 2^nd.

“When I hear a chair dragged across the floor, it takes me back to explosions going off.”

After 20 years of living in the United Kingdom, I returned to the Gaza Strip in September 2023 for a prolonged visit. I wanted to lay the groundwork to return permanently. After so many years away, I wanted to be closer to my parents as they got older, but I also wanted to give back to the community. I had left Gaza to study, and I have worked as an atmospheric scientist, so I wanted to transfer some of this knowledge and expertise back into Gaza.

On the morning of October 7^th, once we finally understood what was going on, I didn’t want to accept that I would have to leave. A day in, my mother and sister—who are British citizens—had already decided to leave, but I had only just returned to Gaza. I wasn’t ready to forgo my new life, especially if my father was still there. We moved from house to house under bombardment. By December—after we had already moved five times—we received an Israeli army leaflet from the sky which told us to evacuate Khan Younis, and said that if we remained in this “dangerous combat zone,” we would be considered part of a “terrorist organization.” I thought about continuing to Rafah, but I felt that this pattern would just repeat itself. So I finally accepted my fate and decided to leave Gaza.

As a British citizen, I am embarrassed to admit that I got out with great ease. I went to the Rafah crossing, and my name was on the list of the [British] Foreign Office. I cannot emphasize enough how unreflective this experience is of most Palestinians. Even at the border crossing, there are families where only half of the members have foreign passports, and those who do desperately try to intercede on their loved ones’ behalf to make sure they don’t get separated. In contrast, I was struck by my privilege. My family were already out—my dad and his wife decided to leave for Cairo before me, and my mother and my sister were in Manchester. And when I got to the Egyptian side, British consulate staff welcomed me. By that point, it was painfully clear that this system values those who have Western passports more than those who don’t.

I had many different feelings as I was leaving Gaza. I felt guilt, as though I was abandoning everybody that was remaining in Gaza, and that’s a really hard feeling to shake, even as most of my friends and family told me to go. I felt relief that I would have basic amenities and that I would get to see my immediate family again. I felt sadness at not knowing if and when I’d be able to go back; and I felt so much anger that Israel has been able to get away with everything without intervention from the so-called “international community.” Around the time I got out, I counted 80 members of my extended family who had been killed by January. I’ve since lost track of the death toll in my family. There is something surreal about discovering the news of death on your phone. We have a cascade of family WhatsApp groups that are updating us about the killings. There is a sense in Palestine—and now in Lebanon—that Facebook has become a graveyard, where every third post is an obituary.

Back in Manchester, I still feel a sense of disorientation. I am a jumpy person anyway, but when I hear a chair dragged across the floor, it takes me back to explosions going off. I keep remembering the children from my extended family; I used to take them to the rooftop for some English language practice to try and distract them from the bombings nearby. The look of extreme panic on their faces is one of the most difficult memories I have of being in Gaza. I also feel an extreme sense of cognitive dissonance. I always understood the injustices perpetrated by Israel, but the extent to which its Western backers have enabled what Israel is doing has completely alienated me from institutions of Western power and democracy. I do feel that most of my network has held and understood me, but I also feel like I have become much less accepting of anybody who isn’t vocally supportive of Palestine, or even neutral.

I had imagined a different life in Gaza: I wanted to work in environmental governance and regulation, perhaps teach at one of Gaza’s universities, help my father with one of his medical projects, and get a small apartment close to my mother in the Tel El-Hawa neighborhood. But the universities in Gaza have been destroyed, my father’s IVF clinic and most of the hospital have been destroyed, and in February, our family home since 1998 was destroyed. At that point, it felt like our hopes for our homeland had also been destroyed with it. Even though the prospects feel bleak, my mother and I have both kept up the hope that this is temporary, and that we will return to Gaza. But I can’t plan my return yet, so I have to do what I can for now, which is mainly fundraising for community kitchens and mental health support for children in Gaza. I have been focused on these projects, and I only returned to work in the beginning of September. Many people I know have also been unable to function; they still feel as though they are in Gaza in one way or another. And even though the center of my life had been in Manchester for the past two decades, I feel that I have lost this past and lost the future. I feel like I was made into a refugee.

Mohammed Ghalayini, as told to Jonathan Shamir on October 4^th.

Zak Hania, Safa Al-Majdalawi, Amal Al-Majdalawi, and Mohammed Ghalayini As told to Jonathan Shamir