Stranded at a closed border as bombs fall, foreign nationals in besieged Gaza await evacuation

KHAN YOUNIS (AP):

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 metres away, I can see it,” Ghabayen, a 54-year-old insurance agent who travelled 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.”

The Israeli military says it goes after only Hamas infrastructure in their war with the militant group. Palestinians reject that, pointing to airstrikes that have hit and damaged UN schools and hospitals in the densely populated strip.

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 materialised 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 US citizenship, caught up in Israel’s devastating air campaign that has killed thousands of Palestinians and crushed entire neighbourhoods. Israel launched its counteroffensive after Hamas fighters surged into Israel on October 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.

For Palestinian Americans stuck in Gaza, President Joe Biden’s proclamations of staunch support for Israel during his wartime visit to the country following Hamas’ unprecedented attack has added to resentments.

“Ridiculous,” was how Hamdan Abu Speitan, a 76-year-old physician from Syracuse, New York, put it.

“He is so busy trying to give Israel weapons that he can’t get water in or get Americans out,” he said, referring to Biden.

The State Department said David Satterfield, recently appointed special envoy for humanitarian issues in the Mideast, was in Israel Tuesday engaged in negotiations with Israel, Egypt and the United Nations to get Rafah to open for US citizens, other dual nationals and employees of international organisations.

Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, blamed Hamas for the hold-up in a briefing on Monday.

“We do believe that Egypt is ready to process American citizens if they can make it to Egyptian authorities,” he told reporters. “Hamas just has to stop blocking their exit.”