Ibrahim Assalia goes to Gaza every year to see his parents.
But this year, the visit was urgent: his father was diagnosed with blood cancer.
So Assalia, his wife and six children – all British nationals – left their home in north London to help a sick family member receive treatment in Jordan.
But Israel’s incessant bombing of the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ attack on Israeli soil on October 7 has prevented Assalia’s father from leaving the blockaded enclave.
He died last week due to lack of medical treatment.
“He died on the 22nd of this month – during the war,” Assalia told Al Jazeera, speaking by telephone from the northern Gaza town of Jabalia.
When he went to the hospital to find out how to bury his father, he was told to find any makeshift cemetery he could and put his body there, even if there were other bodies there. Already.
Hospitals in the Gaza Strip operate like overflowing morgues as Israeli bombardments, which lasted almost a month, killed more than 9,000 Palestinians.
“This is how we bury the dead here,” Assalia explained. “Like five, six, ten in a grave.”
Assalia, a professor of media studies in London and a former English news presenter and editor-in-chief of Palestine TV with the Palestinian Authority from 1998 to 2006, is trying to get his family out of Gaza.
They are among hundreds of foreign nationals and seriously injured Palestinians allowed to leave the Gaza Strip since the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt opened on Wednesday for the first time since the start of the war.
Assalia received a phone call from the British Foreign Office on Thursday evening, informing him that their names were on a list of people authorized to evacuate Gaza.
But Israeli shelling continues to flood the road between the Rafah border and central Jabalia where he and his family fled, after shelling intensified near their family home on the outskirts of the town.
“No taxi can take us there, simply because Israeli tanks are positioned in the area,” Assalia said.
“We heard that they had bombed civilian cars with passengers,” he added, explaining that he had called six taxi companies on Friday morning who informed him of the bombing and told him that it was too dangerous to make the hour-long journey along Gaza’s main Salah Street. al-Din highway.
On Friday, Israel admitted bombing an ambulance convoy traveling south from Gaza City, killing 15 people, according to Palestinian officials.
Trapped, the Assalia family shelters in a room with two other families also of British nationality, all surviving on one meal a day of canned goods.
And their situation becomes even more desperate.
Assalia injured his finger after an Israeli airstrike shattered a window near where he was. His wife is no longer on medication for epilepsy. And his 22-year-old daughter, a medical student, experienced skin irritation that could be due to Israel’s alleged use of white phosphorus munitions.
Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of using chemical weapons against civilians in Gaza, which many experts say would be a violation of international law.
Grateful for the visa
Back in the UK, Nasser Alshanti remains worried for his daughter and her family, but is relieved to learn that they have managed to get out of Gaza.
Yosra Alshanti, her two young children and her husband Ibrahim Taha crossed into the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing, he said, and are now waiting to travel to the Egyptian capital, Cairo, before boarding a ‘a flight to the United Kingdom.
But communicating with Alshanti’s daughter and her family, all British citizens except Taha, has been difficult, the Manchester-based university professor said, because of communications blackouts on the Strip.
It was Alshanti who managed to send a text message to his son-in-law Taha via WhatsApp to inform him that he was on the list of people allowed to leave Gaza through the Rafah border, a message which delayed for some time before to finally succeed.
Although Yosra and her children will have no difficulty entering the UK, Taha will need special permission as a non-UK citizen to be able to do so – but this is something Alshanti has persuaded the authorities to do British authorities to authorize, he said.
“My daughter cannot leave Gaza… without her husband,” Alshanti told British authorities, he told Al Jazeera. “She has two children and is pregnant.”
The concerned father is unsure exactly what type of visa Taha will receive, and has been told it could include anything from a spousal visa to one issued under humanitarian protection.
Alshanti has followed events in the Gaza Strip over the past few weeks with apprehension, wondering if her daughter and her family, who have lived there for seven years, will be able to escape safely.
“I can’t explain my feelings. I couldn’t sleep…I couldn’t concentrate during my classes. All because my mind is totally absorbed by what is happening in Gaza,” he said.
Alshanti said he was grateful for the British government’s response in keeping his family safe and for adding Taha to the list of people to be evacuated, although he had not heard from them for five first days of the conflict.
“Every day after five days I received a call from the crisis team in London, asking me about my daughter,” he said, adding that a British Border Force team visited from London to Cairo to assist in the evacuation of British nationals.
Dispatches from the Rafah border
Salma Alrayyes was checking Facebook whenever she could, during brief periods of internet access, when she learned of the opening of the Rafah border.
This is where authorities at Gaza’s borders and crossing points update their list of foreign nationals allowed to leave every day.
Alrayyes saw his name and that of his family at midnight on Thursday. The next day, at 9 a.m., they went to Rafah, a 20-minute drive from where they had sheltered.
Hours later, Alrayyes, her husband, their three children, her brother-in-law and his family – all British citizens – were still waiting to cross into Egypt after crossing the Palestinian border.
“We are going to Egypt now and then we will see what we are going to do,” she told Al Jazeera by telephone from the Rafah border post. “But we had to leave… (we) are afraid of war.”
Alrayyes had lived in the Gaza Strip for two years. His house in Gaza City was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.
As she and her family flee, her husband’s family, who are not British nationals, are left behind.
“We don’t know what we are going to do,” Alrayyes said repeatedly in despair, cutting the phone call short as Egyptian border authorities summoned her and her family.
