For more than a week, Talaat Ghabayen, a citizen of Norway who spent his whole life in Oslo, has waited days and nights at the Gaza Strip’s land crossing with Egypt as his embassy advised, hoping to flee Israel’s bombardment and looming ground invasion and reunite with his wife and sons back home.
“Egypt is literally meters away, I can see it,” Ghabayen, a 54-year-old insurance agent who traveled to Gaza before the war erupted for his mother’s funeral, said Tuesday from the Rafah crossing.
Under intense Western pressure, the gates at Rafah opened over the weekend for the first time since the war broke out, letting a trickle of humanitarian aid into the besieged strip and stoking hopes that hundreds of foreign nationals trapped in Gaza would be able to cross into safety.
But with each passing hour, Ghabayen loses hope. And each day that Rafah remains shut, he said, is another day that he could die.
“They tell us to go south, then they bomb south. They tell us to go to hospitals, then they bomb hospitals. They tell us to go to shelters, then they bomb shelters,” Ghabayen said of the Israeli army, his voice rising with emotion. “We are not Hamas, we are innocent civilians who don’t even live here.”
Since the war broke out, the United States and other countries have scrambled to arrange charter flights — and even an evacuation ship — to ferry their citizens in Israel to various destinations in Europe.
But no such evacuation has materialized for foreign citizens stranded in Gaza, who are coping with the fiercest Israeli bombing campaign in the territory’s memory and dire shortages of food, water and fuel since Israel severed its flow of supplies to the strip.
Ghabayen is among what Western diplomats estimate to be some 1,700 Palestinians in Gaza with European or U.S. citizenship, caught up in Israel’s devastating air campaign that has killed thousands of Palestinians and crushed entire neighborhoods. Israel launched its counteroffensive after Hamas fighters surged into Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,400 people and abducting over 200 others in an unprecedented attack.
On top of that, there are hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza holding other foreign passports. Many said their governments told them to fill out forms and wait at the Rafah crossing.
More than a week later, they’re still waiting. In some cases, the bombs got to them first.
“We waited so long they’ll have to evacuate us by ambulance,” said Abdelaziz Shaaban, who said American authorities assured him that his whole family would be able to leave through Rafah because his son is a U.S. citizen.
An airstrike crashed outside his home in Gaza City last week, killing his 14-year-old daughter, Joud, and wounding everyone else in the house — just as they were preparing to try their luck at Rafah a third time. His 18-year-old son Youssef, born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, has a broken jaw and wrist. His other daughter broke her arm. Shaaban lost so much blood that he struggles to walk.
“‘We are studying the case, we are studying the case,’ they tell us over and over,” Shaaban said of U.S. officials. “What are you studying? We are wounded and can’t get painkillers. We are wounded and Shifa Hospital kicked us out because they needed room for more patients.”
Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s biggest, is struggling to handle a deluge of war-wounded patients as its resources dwindle. While some trucks of humanitarian aid gradually made their way into Gaza in recent days from Egypt, Palestinians say it’s nowhere near enough to address the humanitarian disaster.
Egypt has refused to open its doors to those fleeing Gaza — in part because it doesn’t want to be seen as aiding Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians but also because it doesn’t want a massive refugee crisis within its borders.
As the days tick by, the desperation of foreign nationals trapped in Gaza is growing. Many are increasingly upset with what seems to them a double standard in Western policy. The same countries failing to respond to their plight, they say, have galvanized to evacuate their citizens from Israel and other war-zones around the world.
“It really makes us feel like second-class citizens,” said Mahmoud Sarhan, a 48-year-old security guard from Essen, Germany, who made his first trip to Gaza in nearly three decades before the war to tend to his ailing mother in the northern Jabaliya refugee camp.
