On October 8, Eman Radwan called her parents from the West Bank and spoke to them for the last time. They were in Gaza where Israel had launched a relentless bombardment following Hamas’ deadly attack on Israeli villages and military outposts the day before.
For years, Radwan had been unable to visit his parents regularly because Israel banned Palestinians from traveling between the West Bank and Gaza, with rare exceptions.
Israel was ordering all Palestinians in Gaza to flee south, but Radwan’s parents could not leave their home. They lived in Gaza City, near the Islamic University that Israel targeted in air raids on October 11.
His father was caring for his mother, who had a heart condition and needed oxygen to breathe – it was impossible for them to leave. The next day, a bomb hit their villa and killed them both, as well as his youngest brother and a young man who came to help them with household chores.
“My relatives found my brother Hassan and my mother first.
“My mother was missing a hand, limbs and a head,” Radwan told Tel Aviv Tribune, trying to hold back tears over the phone. “Two days later, (they) used a tractor to search for my father under the rubble and we also found his (dead body).”
Radwan is one of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank whose families are in Gaza. Israel’s movement restrictions on Palestinians within and between the two territories it occupies mean she has seen her parents and siblings only a handful of times over the past 20 years.
She says she still can’t believe she will never see her mother, father or brother again.
“Many friends and relatives who helped us bury my family were also killed later (by Israeli bombing),” Radwan told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Misplaced hope
Many Palestinians who have been separated from their loved ones in Gaza due to Israeli occupation are terrified that their loved ones will die.
Fatima Abdallah* and her husband – both from Gaza and whose last names were changed for fear of reprisals – moved to the West Bank in 1997, four years after the signing of the Oslo Accords and raised hopes for of a Palestinian state.
They had just finished their studies in the UK and had high hopes that a Palestinian state would be established within the next two years, as promised in the peace deal.
But Abdallah’s mother was already a refugee herself, uprooted to Gaza during the Nakba when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were violently expelled to enable the creation of Israel in 1948, and she warned her daughter that Israel would not wouldn’t let each other see each other if they lived in different territories.
“She told me that she would be more likely to see me again if I emigrated to Canada rather than if I moved to the West Bank,” Abdallah recalls.
His mother did not believe that Israel would allow the Palestinians to have a state.
Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank and Gaza were to be treated as a single territorial unit. In practice, Israel has increased its illegal settlement efforts and required West Bank Palestinians to obtain permits to visit Gaza.
A Palestinian Intifada – which derives from the word “to shake” in Arabic – broke out in response to Israel’s growing occupation on September 28, 2000. In the first five days, 47 Palestinians and five Israelis were killed.
Israeli restrictions worsened until it became almost impossible for Palestinians in the West Bank to visit their relatives in Gaza and vice versa.
In exceptional cases, Palestinians could obtain a permit to visit a dying family member or to attend an event or activity as an employee of an international non-governmental organization.
Restrictions were further tightened after Hamas won elections in Gaza in 2006 and retained control of the strip despite attacks from the dominant Palestinian political party, Fatah. The following year, Israel imposed a stifling land, air and sea blockade on Gaza, with help from Egypt which controls the Rafah crossing into the enclave.
Rights groups describe Gaza as an “open-air prison” since almost no one is allowed to enter or leave the territory. Abdallah said she was unable to see her family in Gaza between 2006 and 2018.
“A whole generation of my family – nephews and nieces – became teenagers and graduated from college without us having much face-to-face interaction. I missed an entire part of their lives and my children don’t know who their own cousins are in Gaza,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Dying to see family
Until October 7, Palestinians could generally only see their relatives from Gaza if they were allowed to seek treatment in the West Bank, occupied East Jerusalem or Israel, according to Munir Nuseibeh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer. and civil society activist.
Over the past decade, he only saw his Gaza relatives if they needed urgent surgery.
“Basically the only chance I have of seeing any of them is if they have cancer,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
As of August 2023, the World Health Organization said 1,492 people had obtained medical permits allowing them to leave Gaza for treatment, out of 1,851 applications that month.
In 2022, Abdallah saw his sister and mother because the former had a tumor that doctors thought might be cancerous (they later discovered it was benign). The only person allowed to accompany Abdullah’s sister to get tested in the West Bank was their elderly mother.
Nuseibeh and Abdallah now fear that their sick or elderly relatives will die under Israeli bombardments or because of the stifling siege of Gaza. Since October 7, Israel has strengthened the blockade by depriving Gaza’s 2.3 million residents of food, water and electricity, most of whom are now crowded into the south of the enclave.
UN experts and hundreds of law and conflict academics have warned that Israel’s campaign in Gaza amounts to collective punishment and could amount to genocide.
“My understanding of this genocide is that it actually targets civilians and civilian life in so many different ways. We have had (in our extended family) several victims.
“Our closest family, they have managed to survive the situation so far. But they were all moved from Gaza City to the south,” Nuseibeh told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Abdallah’s 80-year-old mother also left her home to head to the south, which Israel is bombing despite telling Palestinians the region would be safe at the start of the war.
After Israel resumed bombing on December 1 to break a seven-day ceasefire, the director general of the government media office in Gaza said more than 700 Palestinians had been killed in 24 hours.
“My mother was only four years old when the Nakba happened and she can’t take it anymore,” Abdallah said. “It’s not even the bombings or the war, but the fact that she left her home again.
“She feels like her life is ending the same way it began.”
*Name changed to protect identity