An Israeli-palestinian gaza worker whose children are in the hospital in Gaza back: “We are all stuck in the West Bank,” he adds
“My son, when I speak with him, I say, ‘How are you?’ and he tells me, ‘Baba, I write my name on my arm, in case I am killed,’” Zrain says. His son wants people to know who he is when he dies.
His wife and five children are staying in a hospital in Gaza where the UN says around 50,000 people are trying to flee from Israeli strikes. He relishes every text message and every call, even if the news is chilling.
While safe in the courtyard of the university, another worker who lives in Gaza says being away from their children torments him.
A man looks through his phone at photos of his daughters. He says seeing photos of their smiling faces before the war helps him forget about the bad things that have happened.
Alfarany has nearly two dozen nieces and nephews and says he gets overwhelmed thinking about all the children going through the trauma of war right now.
Ibrahim Alfarany, 27, is a Palestinian worker in the Gaza Strip. He has lived in a hotel in the West Bank for three years
He said he deleted the video because it disturbed him too much. “I watched it four or five times, and then said, ‘I’m gonna delete it,’ and I did.”
His family survived an Israeli airstrike several weeks ago at a playground. There are no buildings left in his neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Gaza City, he says, and his house was among those destroyed.
Alfarany says he’s very happy and relieved that his brother is alive, but it’s difficult to watch the lives of family and friends in Gaza from afar.
While Alfarany was able to take a bus to the West Bank after Oct. 7, his brother was detained by the Israeli military near Nahariya, in northern Israel. After losing contact for more than 20 days, Alfarany finally talked to his brother on Friday, as his brother was walking into Gaza along with thousands of other workers.
One of the Palestinian workers, Ibrahim Alfarany, has been staying at Al-Istiqlal University for more than three weeks. He lives in south of Tel Aviv and works at a store that sells vegetables for a few weeks at a time.
In the aftermath of the October 7 attack, several thousand people from the Gaza Strip who did not want to be arrested avoided being taken into custody and ended up in shelters and camps in the West Bank. There is an Israeli occupation in the West Bank. For now, their accommodations are provided by the Palestinian Authority, which has some local control in the West Bank.
Laundry hangs from the windows at the campus of the Al-Istiqlal University. There are dorm rooms stacked with bunk beds, and in larger halls, men lounge on mattresses pushed up against the walls, scrolling on their cellphones for news from Gaza. They fill the plastic bags with everything they have. You can get a shave and a trim at the impromptu barber shop if you join the wait list.
Some of those men, after returning to Gaza, told NPR they had been rounded up across Israel by the country’s security forces and detained following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, when militants stormed into Israel, killing around 1,400 people and taking an estimated 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials.
The number of people who have died in Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip has risen to more than 9000 according to Palestinian health officials. The homes have been destroyed.
They cannot go back to Gaza without going through Israel. There is no way to know how they would get to Gaza.
On Friday, they heard about thousands of other laborers who were forced to return to Gaza on foot from Israel — dropped off several miles from the Israeli border with Gaza, wearing numbered tags on their ankles.
News from Gaza comes in conversations in the hallway, over the communal sinks, between bunk beds, and texts with relatives. For thousands of workers from Gaza who are stuck in makeshift shelters and camps in the West Bank, much of their world — including their families — is still 60 miles away.
Hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in northern Gaza and will have only 3 hours to leave today.
Israeli troops remain in the Strip about a week after entering Gaza through a ground offensive. This military effort has mostly been focused in the north and has effectively cut the strip in half, preventing aid from getting in or civilians from getting out.
Officials in Gaza also closed the one available border crossing from Gaza into Egypt on Saturday. They said foreign passport holders will not be allowed to leave Gaza through the Rafah border crossing into Egypt unless patients from the hospitals in Gaza City and northern Gaza are permitted to get to the crossing.
The crossing is open for Palestinians with foreign nationalities, and for Palestinians with connections to foreign countries and foreign employers. More Americans were on the list of people allowed to leave Gaza today, even though there was a fourth day for the border to be open.