On the appointed day, the evacuees first had to find a car with enough gas to travel — and a driver with enough nerve to take them. Then there was the ride to the border, then the long line of people, all quietly impatient, followed by hours of waiting in the departures hall of the border crossing.
Next came the nerve-racking moment where officials checked travel documents against a list of names compiled by foreign embassies and approved by Israel, Egypt and Hamas. Then the bus ride from the Palestinian side to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, followed by more waiting and more document-checking in the arrivals hall.
Finally, they emerged through a dun-colored archway with an Egyptian flag rippling over it, and they were in Egypt — safe. Safe, after more than three weeks in which every day they had thought that they might die.
“In Egypt now. Free!” Ramona Okumura, a Seattle resident who was volunteering in Gaza for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund when the war broke out, texted a Times journalist on Wednesday evening.
About 340 dual nationals from Bulgaria, Finland, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan and elsewhere, as well as employees from around the world of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and other aid groups, crossed on Wednesday. Another group of about 340 people, among them more than 100 Americans, crossed on Thursday.
So much depended on the bureaucratic minutiae of passports and visas, on the long, unwieldy list that determined whether someone could cross — and, perhaps, whether she or he would survive.
Dalal Abu Middain, an American citizen, and her family turned back on Thursday because crossing would have meant leaving her 6-year-old daughter, Maha, who was rejected from crossing, despite having U.S. citizenship.
Abdallah Dahalaan, 76, an Australian dual citizen, chose to stay in Gaza because his wife, Samah, was not on the list.
“She said, ‘Just go, and then we’ll see what happens after.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not going,’” Mr. Dahalaan said by phone on Wednesday. “Imagine leaving your partner behind. It’s just — it’s not the right thing to do.”
So they rejoined the more than two million people who remain trapped in Gaza, those with no prospect of escaping the hunger, thirst or Israeli bombardment they have endured since Oct. 7. That was when the decades-old conflict exploded again with an attack on Israel by the armed Palestinian group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 people. In response, the Israeli military launched an all-out campaign against Gaza.