Jaclynn Ashly
The Electronic Intifada / June 29, 2024
On 15 October 2023, a week after Israel’s devastating assault on the Gaza Strip began, Hafez Jameel al-Masri went to his apartment in west Rafah to take a shower.
“I turned on the shower, and the water fell on my body,” recounts the 28-year-old from an apartment in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. “All I know after that is that I ended up under the rubble. I woke up when I was still buried.”
All of Masri’s immediate 13 family members were killed in the Israeli airstrike that day. Four of his nephews survived because they were not in the house at the time. However, one of them still sustained critical injuries from the impact of the blast, which reached surrounding homes.
When Masri was dug out from the debris, he was informed that he was the sole survivor from the airstrike on his family’s home.
“It was a huge shock,” Masri told The Electronic Intifada. “It took me one month to actually process and accept what had happened. My father and mother were everything to me. But now my parents, my six brothers and sisters and all of their children don’t exist anymore.”
More than 37,500 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October. Many human rights observers say Israel’s unprecedented aggression in Gaza amounts to genocide.
Masri had also sustained injuries from the impact of the airstrike to an eye and his head and suffered burns all over his body.
After healing, he threw his energy into providing emergency assistance and raising funds to help Palestinians living in sprawling tent settlements in Rafah and trying to escape Israel’s relentless bombardments
Time to join the exodus
A few weeks before Israel would begin its deadly invasion of Rafah in May, Masri, who has Egyptian citizenship, decided it was time to leave.
“I was really scared of the (Israeli) soldiers,” Masri says. “I saw the pictures from the north where they stripped people and took photos of them. I didn’t care about being killed in an airstrike, but I didn’t want to be humiliated before being killed.”
Like the tens of thousands of other Palestinians who have fled into Egypt from Gaza through the Rafah crossing, which has now been sealed after Israel seized it last month, Masri is living in limbo, surviving off charity and condemned to uncertainty about his future.
“Now I’m just here in Cairo waiting to go back to Gaza or for the world to end, whichever happens first,” Masri says, with a slight shrug.
Unless Palestinians have foreign passports, international connections with a foreign country appealing on their behalf, or are approved for medical treatment in Egypt, the only other avenue for escaping through the Rafah crossing is to pay an exorbitant fee to Hala Consulting and Tourism, an Egyptian company owned by Sinai tribal leader and business tycoon Ibrahim al-Organi.
‘King of the Crossing’
Nicknamed the “King of the Crossing” and known to have close ties to Egyptian President Abdulfattah al-Sisi, Organi owns half a dozen companies operating under the umbrella of the Organi Group, which he founded in 2010.
Hala, one of the companies in the group, has monopolized transfer services at the Rafah crossing and has become the only route for many Palestinians to flee devastated Gaza — that is if they can come up with the thousands of dollars needed to secure an exit permit.
Before the Israeli attacks, Hala charged everyone crossing the Egypt-Gaza border $350. But now the price has increased 14-fold, with Palestinians being forced to pay $5,000 per adult and $2,500 for children under 16. In April, the company made, according to some media reports $2 million per day from Palestinians fleeing Gaza.
Now, however, all pedestrian movement through the Rafah crossing, also a crucial lifeline for humanitarian aid into the besieged territory, has halted.
Despite holding Egyptian citizenship, Masri still had to pay the $5,000 “travel coordination” fee to Hala to get into Egypt before the crossing closed. He also collected funds to assist his four remaining nephews, ages 14 to 20, escape the indiscriminate killings in Gaza, paying a total of $25,000.
The 14-year-old, who sustained critical injuries during the airstrike in Rafah, is now in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Turkey.
Organi and his companies are “connected to a very deep web of corruption that feeds all the way to the head of the Egyptian government [al-Sisi],” says Raed Jarrar, a Palestinian-American political advocate based in Washington, D.C.
The income earned by Hala, along with other Organi companies, is not subject to any known oversight, and no public records are available to track where the money is spent and who benefits from it.
‘Dire situation’
Throughout the war, some Palestinians set up GoFundMe campaigns with their international contacts to raise the funds to flee. Others used up their life savings paying Hala to get their loved ones across the border.
As many as 100,000 Palestinians are estimated to have entered Egypt through the crossing since the start of the war, Diab al-Lough, the Palestianian ambassador to Egypt said in a media interview with the newsagency, Reuters.
Upon their arrival in Egypt, the government issues Palestinians a residence permit valid for only 45 days, according to a Palestinian from Gaza currently living in Cairo, but has turned a blind eye to tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians overstaying their permits.
Left undocumented in the country, Palestinians from Gaza have been reduced to relying on charity, collecting cash assistance from the Palestinian embassy in Cairo and various charitable organizations to afford basic necessities, such as rent and food.
The Egyptian government considers displaced Palestinians as “guests.” Their undocumented status means they are denied most work opportunities; they cannot open bank accounts, register their children for school, open a business, or access health insurance.
“Their situation in Egypt is completely dire,” said Sammy Nabulsi, a Palestinian-American attorney who has helped hundreds of Palestinians with US citizenship and their relatives leave Gaza since the war.
“These are people who have been displaced multiple times from the only place they have ever known. Their homes and belongings have been destroyed, they’ve gone hungry, they don’t have any money or access to money. They don’t have access to gainful employment, housing, or health care.”
“Now, they may be safer in Egypt, but they are essentially being condemned to a life of homelessness, hunger, and desperation,” Nabulsi continued. “It is the worst-case scenario for them — second to what they were facing in Gaza.”
Political solution
The Palestinian embassy in Cairo has pushed for the Egyptian government to issue temporary residency permits for Gazans until the war is over to ease their conditions, but to no avail.
“There needs to be a political solution to create temporary and lawful immigration pathways for these people to be able to establish some sort of legal status,” said Nabulsi. “They need to have their needs met; they need education for their children and employment, along with access to health care, housing, and food.
“This is necessary because I don’t see a world in which all of the infrastructure destroyed in Gaza can be rebuilt and reestablished in Gaza even over the next 10 years,” he added.
Some Palestinians who have left, however, say they are terrified of the possibility of Israel prohibiting them from ever returning to Gaza, mirroring what happened to their ancestors in 1948 during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” when 750,000-850,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their lands and homes during the creation of the Israeli state.
These Palestinians, along with those displaced in 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, were never allowed to return and became permanent refugees, transferring that status to their descendants.
“This is why it is imperative that any humanitarian solution to this is one in which there is temporary relief and status for displaced Palestinians in Egypt and other countries, but it needs to be coupled with a right of return,” Nabulsi says. “And Israel must be held accountable for that.”
“Given the urgency of the situation, we must make sure these people are being fed and housed and their children are given some semblance of normalcy in their lives.”
‘Feeling worse’
Maisa Mahdy left Gaza for Egypt on 30 January with her five children, one of whom is wheelchair-bound, as well her physically and mentally disabled nephew, who was left orphaned. But, now, Mahdy said she regrets leaving Gaza.
“It was a very difficult choice to make,” the 55-year-old recounted, sitting on a couch in a rented apartment in Cairo. “Our entire soul and identity is connected to the land in Gaza. But, in the end, I decided to leave because I knew the Israelis were making their way to Rafah and how can I run from soldiers while caring for two disabled people?”
“I thought at the time that leaving Gaza would be less painful than continuing to experience all the death and destruction there,” Mahdy told The Electronic Intifada as tears began to line her eyes. “But we are feeling worse now than we did in Gaza.”
Mahdy borrowed from relatives and friends, raising the $35,000 needed to pay Hala for the exit permits. The family, however, was not able to get enough for Mahdy’s husband, who is still in Rafah. A teacher in Gaza, he was the family’s sole breadwinner. With banks in Gaza bombed and most rendered inoperable, her husband has not been able to send Mahdy money.
She and her family are now entirely reliant on charity to survive — a condition shared by many, if not most, Palestinians who escaped into Egypt.
“We weren’t afraid in Gaza because we only had two options: survive or die,” Mahdy said. “But in Egypt, we are living in suspension, not knowing what will happen today or tomorrow. Not knowing if we will become homeless here or if Israel will ever allow us to return to our home.”
“At least in Gaza, we would be killed with our family,” Mahdy, who lost 10 of her immediate relatives in the past eight months, including two of her brothers, said. “But in Egypt, we have to wait for the news about which one of our loved ones or friends are killed each day.”
Mahdy’s emotions suddenly overpowered her and she began to sob. “I am not crying because I am weak,” Mahdy said. “It’s just because I miss all the people who have died.”
Jaclynn Ashly is a multimedia freelance journalist who worked for years in the occupied West Bank
