His Family Fled Violence in the Gaza Strip. And Then Fled Again, and Again. Where Do They Go Now?

Listen to What Next:

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib hasn’t set foot in Gaza for two decades. But every day, he picks up his phone and gets transported to a war zone. His whole family lives in Gaza—nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles—and his brother, Mohammed. WhatsApp is their lifeline.

Right now, Alkhatib’s brother is in the city of Rafah. He has a couple of younger kids with him and his wife. They’re sleeping in an abandoned coffee shop. Rafah is the southernmost city in Gaza—what many people saw as the last stop in a long flight from Israeli bombardment. Over the past few months, the population has swelled from 250,000 to more than 1 million. And Mohammed? He has just been told that he should look into relocating again.

“He came from Khan Yunis. And he was in Gaza City. He fled seven different times. Pretty much every time he’s fled, the place where he was at was partially or fully hit and destroyed,” Alkhatib said.

Like everyone else in Rafah, Alkhatib’s family is there because there’s no other place left. It’s not exactly safe. A couple of months back, 28 of his family members were killed when an Israeli strike flattened a family home. But everything is relative, he says.

Then, this weekend, things changed. In an interview on ABC News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dug in on a plan to send ground troops in to this quasi–“safe zone.” And early Sunday morning, Netanyahu sent Israel Defense Forces in. They freed two Israeli hostages—and they killed dozens of Gazans.

Alkhatib is certain that this kind of assault will lead to a humanitarian disaster. “No. 1: the transportation methods. The roads that allowed people to leave and head south are largely now either gone, depleted, damaged, or destroyed,” he said. “No. 2 is that if an operation in Rafah takes place, that ultimately will take the Rafah crossing out of commission, one way or another. The lifeline of Gaza, where the majority of the aid has been coming in, will be severed. How are you going to have any supplies coming into Gaza at the scale that is needed to sustain a large population?”

On Thursday’s episode of What Next, we spoke about what it’s like waiting things out in Rafah. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Tell me about your brother. What’s happened to him after Oct. 7 really seems to embodies the constant motion that Gazans have been in since Israel’s ground invasion. Where was he on Oct. 7, and then how did that change over the course of the last few months?

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: He was working. He’s a senior program manager for this British NGO in the Gaza Strip. And he was at work when things unfolded. But soon after, it became clear that this was going to be a disaster of epic proportions. And a week later, on Oct. 13, our family home was bombed when Mohammed and 33 people were inside the house—with no warning, no heads up, no rooftop strikes by smaller drones to give people a chance to leave. The building came down on them. Our family’s apartment is on the second floor, so they pushed their way out of the rubble. He has a 13-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a 1-year-old baby, and his wife. His car was destroyed. Their properties were destroyed. They didn’t manage to get anything out, but they got out.

He called me immediately, and that was one of the only times I’ve ever heard him cry—at how overwhelmed but weirdly delighted and happy he was that they were still alive. But then he was also concerned about the other family members still in the building. Roughly 10 or 15 family members had varying injuries, most........

© Slate

visit website