December 23, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
CAIRO– The very first indication of problem was the school bus that reversed and dropped Momen Yaghi’s child back home minutes after selecting her up in Gaza City on the early morning of Oct. 7.
There would be no school that day, no school for a very long time, Momen rapidly comprehended as word spread of the mass killings and kidnappings performed by Hamas inside Israel. Dispute had actually formed life in Gaza for generations, however the scale of this attack immediately registered it as various.
Others worried, however Momen, 50, holds on to the belief that his household might ride out the war as they had previous eruptions, by stockpiling materials and gathering inside till the bombs stopped.
His mistake quickly ended up being clear. Their lives deciphered with warp speed.
Momen saw old good friends dead in the debris of his area. His better half, Rania, was swallowed up with sorrow over the loss of a cherished sibling. Their teenage children started shaking in fear from the unrelenting surges.
“Baba,” the ladies pleaded with him, “it’s time to go.”
The household would set out on the exact same desperate look for security as numerous countless other Gaza citizens. Momen had a slim blue American passport that suggested, unlike many of those getting away, his household may have a method out.
Their location was the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
In typical times, the journey is an hour by vehicle. Momen’s household would deal with a 10-day trek through a post-apocalyptic landscape of tanks, smoldering structures and decomposing remains, their hearts breaking with each action that brought them further from home.
The household of 4 stated their experience through comprehensive interviews, and offered e-mails, files, images and videos of their journey– and the life they left.
“It’s extremely frightening,” Momen stated. “You are entering into the unidentified.”
Momen matured in a home on Mohamed al-Aswad Street, a four-story structure where members of his prolonged household had apartment or condos on various floorings, the custom-made in close-knit Gaza. He left in 1993 to study in North Carolina, taking a trip back and forth for more than a years before returning for excellent to be with his ailing moms and dads in their last years.
After they passed, Momen, Rania and their children continued to reside in the third-floor system, which he remodelled in 2010. He understood well the volatility of the dispute, the inevitability of Israeli airstrikes. Still, he changed a wall with big windows and established what he calls “my station,” a breezy perch where he might keep an eye out over the community as he enjoyed his early morning coffee and cigarettes.
Momen was at his station when news broke of the Hamas attackHe inspected his phone continuously, signing up with next-door neighbors in the rush to purchase bread and canned products. They all understood what was coming.
The descents on in his location got here before dawn the next early morning, he stated, targeting a Hamas leader who lived neighboring. Momen’s children– Malak, 15, and Noreen, 13– screamed when the blast shook their home and a brilliant flash brightened the dark sky.
“Calm down; it’s not us. Do not fret,” he remembered informing them. “Nothing will occur to us. They’re going to strike Hamas individuals, Hamas locations.”
The strikes didn’t stop, and they weren’t restricted to understood Hamas areas. The battle was most extreme during the night, so Momen set up a location for the household to sleep with a buddy who lived down the street– in a home with a basement, a rarity in Gaza.
They invested the daytime in their own home, the ladies typically safeguarding in a closet where they didn’t feel the tremblings as much. They plagued Momen to sign up with the State Department, on a list of U.S. residents looking for evacuationHe did, simply in case, though he was independently uncertain he might get them all out on a single U.S. passport. And he would never ever leave them behind.
In the evening, they pulled away to the next-door neighbor’s basement with other households. They set out thin bed mattress and attempted to sleep, however the adrenaline and surges made it nearly difficult. Momen’s children stopped consuming. Often they wept and grumbled. It was even worse, he stated, to see them fall quiet, eyes broad and hands shivering.
On Nov. 1, throughout a daytime lull, Momen’s more youthful child, Noreen, found the kids next door waving to them from throughout the alley. She got her phone and started shooting. The nine-second clip reveals 2 little faces glimpsing out of a window. One smiles when she sees Noreen, who waves back. Rania advised her children to keep away from the windows.
By daybreak the next early morning, the kids next door were dead.
Momen Yaghi’s more youthful child, Noreen, found kids next door and waved hey there. The next early morning, the kids waving in the video were dead. (Video: Yaghi household)
The strike that eliminated them occurred after midnight, Momen remembered. He signed up with the males who went out to assist, however it was pitch-black and treacherous.
They started digging with their bare hands. There were 8 individuals under the collapsed structure, they thought, however they just handled to recuperate 2 bodies.
To recover the others, they ‘d need to wait till daybreak, a painful possibility as they listened to the wails of the kids’s granny.
“Come assist us!” she asked, Momen remembered.
Damage in Momen Yaghi’s home in Gaza City after Israeli airstrikes struck a neighboring structure. (Video: Video and Photo: Yaghi household)
The dead weren’t complete strangers. They were his next-door neighbors of 40 years, individuals who wanted him well when he left for America and invited him back when he returned. When day broke, Momen saw among them “in pieces.”
“It remained in my head 3 or 4 days, simply considering it,” he stated. “But since we have many stories, a lot of occurrences, you begin forgetting.”
The blast next door had actually harmed Momen’s own home so terribly that the household were required to move into their next-door neighbor’s basement. He was resourceful, Momen stated, and ran lines from another next-door neighbor’s photovoltaic panels to supply electrical power for the growing variety of individuals hiding in his basement.
They started running low on foodEverybody consumed simply one meal a day. Rania and the ladies were good friends with the next-door neighbor’s spouse, so they would invest their days upstairs, having tea and reassuring one another before it was time to return underground after the last call to prayer.
Around 9 each night it was “celebration time,” Momen stated with a dry laugh. The flash from a strike would show up before the noise, a frightening split-second.
“You see the light is coming however you do not see who’s going to get struck,” Momen stated. “Is it us or not?”
Damage in Momen Yaghi’s community and home in Gaza City after Israeli airstrikes struck a close-by structure. (Video: Video and Photo: Yaghi household)
Momen weighed their finest possibilities for survival. Strikes had actually turned much of their district into a moonscape of knee-high debris and twisted wires. Electrical energy was almost gone. Momen, who has diabetes, kept taking insulin despite the fact that it might no longer be cooled.
Throughout this stretch, when cell service flickered on for a couple of minutes, Rania got news that her sibling Rana had actually been eliminated in a strike in another part of Gaza together with her 3-year-old child Ahmed and 5-year-old child Nisreen.
Rania had actually loved her niece and nephew. A video of Nisreen from before the war revealed her dancing at a household event. Ahmed, whose brief life had actually required surgical treatments for a heart disease, had actually been blown apart.
“First, they discovered his leg,” Rania stated, sobbing.
She fretted continuously about the rest of her household, spread and inaccessible. Rania had nearly no news of her moms and dads or 8 making it through brother or sisters. Last she heard, her 73-year-old dad, too ill to leave with the others, was under barrage at a U.N.-run center in the north. He informed her he might see Israeli tanks from the window.
“I call him 200 times for it to link even when,” she stated. “Just to hear his voice.”
From the basement, the strikes seemed like they were getting better, though the household stated they never ever got a caution call from the Israeli armed force. In some cases a “weak” one hit initially– a caution before a much heavier blast. Their willpower to sit tight was fluctuating. The next-door neighbor’s other half left her kids and left. Her hubby remained.
Their departure might have conserved lives. In the early night of Nov. 2, around the time Rania and the women were generally aboveground having tea, a strike hit your house.
A deafening blast shook their hideout. The shock wave, they stated, rattled their bones. Smoke put into the basement, together with water from a burst tank upstairs. Noreen and Malak went to their moms and dads and holds on to them as they place on masks and wheezed in the darkness.
“We could not breathe,” Momen remembered.
Leaving wasn’t an alternative up until daybreak. They attempted not to think about the worst-case circumstance: that their exit may be obstructed by the pancaked home above them. Their sanctuary, they feared, would become their burial place.
At strike Nov. 3, the owner, Momen and another next-door neighbor made their method upstairs and felt the early morning air struck their faces. The bomb had actually ripped through the walls, and the upper floorings had actually collapsed.
“We took a look at each other– me and the owner of your house and the other guy,” Momen remembered. “I informed them, ‘I believe it’s time to leave.'”
The household rushed to fill knapsacks with basics for their escape: a couple modifications of clothing, 2 sleeping mats, a pillow, their ID cards and, most notably, the U.S. passport.
The only individual results Momen took were his collection of prayer beads and a thin stack of images from his time in America– pictures of him relaxing by the water on the Outer Banks, as a fresh-faced college graduate in graduation gown, at the restaurant he opened with the confident name New Dawn. He was happy to end up being a U.S. resident in 2007.
Those memories appeared to come from a various individual, he stated, instead of the sleep deprived, chain-smoking guy who packed them into a bag, steeling himself for an unsure journey.
“You’re taking it step by action and you do not understand anything,” Momen stated. “Where are you going? What will be the next location?”
Like countless other Palestinians searching for a sanctuary in Gaza, the household chose their very first stop would be al-Shifa Hospital, the vast medical complex that had actually ended up being a centerpiece of the warA medical facility administrator, a nephew of Momen’s, had actually vowed to take care of them.
The household stacked into a next-door neighbor’s sedan for the brief drive to the healthcare facility. For the very first time, they saw the apparently unlimited damage of their city. Preferred coffee shops and stores were eliminated. Stunned survivors selected through particles.
They made it to al-Shifa around twelve noon and remained in the yard till they might find Momen’s nephew. Displaced individuals were oversleeping camping tents, in stairwells, in any spot of area.
Injured individuals gotten here by vehicle and by donkey cart. Their bodies were shredded, bloodied, burned. The morgue was overruning. A cooled ice cream truck had actually been repurposed to save bodies; Rania was frightened to see a guy position his dead kid inside.
Israel struck an ambulance on Nov. 3 near Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital. The Israel Defense Forces declares the ambulances were being utilized by Hamas. (Video: Reuters)
About 2 hours after they showed up, an Israeli strike strike an ambulance simply outside evictions of the health center. A minimum of 15 individuals were eliminated.
“I was fortunate,” Momen stated. “I was going to get coffee, however I didn’t go to that door. I went to the other door.”
He had actually handled, when again, to remain an action ahead of death.
Momen and his household invested the next week at the medical facility. His nephew had actually protected Rania and the ladies a desirable area in the medical library, currently loaded with displaced individuals. Momen oversleeped his nephew’s workplace in the administration structure.
They made it through mainly on dates. One guy established a makeshift stand selling fava beans and falafel– without bread– however most households didn’t have cash for that.
The structure they remained in had safe and clean water for about half an hour a day. “You need to rush and fill in those minutes,” Rania stated.
She killed time by checking out an injured household pal in the part of the substance that was still operating, hardly, as an emergency clinicTo arrive, she strolled previous hurt individuals depending on discomfort on the flooring, heard the screams of clients going through surgical treatments without anesthesia, saw medical personnel bring body parts covered in fabric.
“All you see are dead individuals,” she stated. “And then their households come and begin shouting and screaming. A few of them, they lost everyone.”
In their very first days there, strikes struck a neighboring Italian dining establishment and a grocery store car park. Shrapnel flew into the substance. After dark, the strikes grew louder, more detailed. The household stated they enjoyed if they handled to get an hour of sleep each night.
“We were frightened,” Momen stated. “We understood something was going to take place.”
It was time to leave.
Their next objective was to make it throughout Wadi Gaza, the entrance to the southern part of the Strip, one action better to the Egyptian border. Possibly there, Momen figured, they ‘d have cell reception and might see if the embassy had actually composed with brand-new directions.
They were following the path Israel had actually bought them to take a trip, however they likewise understood the south had actually not been spared from strikes. Momen and Rania attempted to remain favorable for the ladies. Load light, Momen informed them, simply a knapsack each. They would leave whatever else at the medical facility.
No cars and trucks were offered, so they triggered on foot to the home of Rania’s auntie in the Shabiya district. From there, they took a vehicle to a method station, then a horse-drawn cart to al-Kuwait Square, the beginning point for the most treacherous part of the path: Salah al-Din Road, Gaza’s primary north-south artery.
Male weren’t permitted to bring bags; Momen was to stroll with his hands up and eyes down.
Other leaving households had actually provided ideas for survival: Don’t drop anything. Do not assist others. Do not talk.
No food or restroom breaks for the whole four-mile gantlet. Whatever you do, they were informed, do not stop.
They marched onto the roadway and signed up with a stream of the displaced; 10s of countless households would stroll the very same course. The image alone was squashing, Momen stated, similar to black-and-white pictures from the Nakba, or “disaster,” the word Arabs utilize for the required displacement of Palestinians throughout Israel’s development in 1948.
“The scene was stunning, how they embarrassed us,” Momen stated. “You seem like you’re leaving your home, and who understands when you’ll be back.”
Displaced Palestinians leave south on foot and horse-drawn carts along Salah al-Din Road. (Video: Motaz Azaiza/Instagram)
Within minutes, they reached a cluster of tanks and Israeli forces. At gunpoint, Momen’s children saw Israeli soldiers for the very first time in their lives. The forces barked orders at the households.
“Noreen was really unsteady,” Rania stated of her more youthful child. “I held her hand and attempted to comfort her.”
The household kept their eyes down however it was difficult not to see individuals in wheelchairs having a hard time to move over the unequal, bombed-out course. The mom strolling with 2 young kids on her back. A male bring his senior daddy.
They flinched at the noise of strikes and attempted not to gag at the smell of death.
“Concentrate on the roadway,” Momen whispered to his horrified children.
At one point, a boy strolling near them was plucked from the crowd and made to strip naked in front of the Israeli soldiers.
“They wish to reveal that, ‘We’re going to make you absolutely nothing,'” Momen stated.
The household had not had the ability to shower or alter clothing in over a week. They had actually hardly consumed. Exhausted and starving, the women asked if they might sit, simply for a couple of minutes. They had to keep going.
They reached Wadi Gaza, the wetlands that bisect the Strip.
Crossing into the south had actually been simple before the war. Individuals reoccured all the time. That day, Momen stated, he felt as if we was getting in into another life.
One line kept flashing through his mind: “We’re losing Gaza.”
The household rested briefly and gathered their ideas. A horse cart took them to a pal of Rania’s daddy in the city of Deir al-Balah.
Warplanes buzzed overhead however, for the very first time in weeks, Momen stated, they felt a step of security. Now he simply needed to get his household throughout the border. He had actually been authorized for entry while they were stuck at the health center and wasn’t sure he was still qualified. Word came from the U.S. Embassy: Anyone on a list because Nov. 1 might leave.
This was their opportunity. The next early morning, Momen, Rania and their children stated tearful bye-byes to their host and left for the border.
Momen’s stomach remained in knots: “I was believing, ‘How are we going to go through?'”
The war has actually complicated his identity as an American, Momen stated. A few of the bombs that fell around him were U.S.-made; he was hurt by the Biden administration’s rejection to sign up with global require a cease-fire. Next-door neighbors, furious after airstrikes, cursed Washington for their torment.
“Sometimes they inform me, ‘Look what the Americans are doing to us,'” Momen stated. “What am I going to state?”
At the Rafah checkpoint, the household moved in between the Palestinian Authority workplace and U.S. workers, whom Momen referred to as practical and friendly as they hurried to get Rania and the ladies purple emergency situation travel passports.
After about 7 hours, the household was authorized to go into Egypt. All of them.
It was bittersweet, Momen stated. Just Noreen and Malak mored than happy. Rania grieved her sibling and was troubled at the idea of leaving her daddy.
As they boarded the bus for the last crossing, Momen swallowed difficult and took one last appearance behind him. He seemed like he was being divided in half. He stated a prayer for those who could not make it out.
“I was stating, ‘Bye, Gaza,’ in my head,” he stated. “And I want to return one day.”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz added to this report.