December 23, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
Momen Yaghi, 50, a U.S. citizen, and his spouse, Rania, embrace on the balcony of their short-term residence in Cairo on Nov. 19. They fled Gaza with their daughters after Israeli bombardment destroyed their residence, they usually hope to achieve america. (Sima Diab for The Washington Put up) Touch upon this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
CAIRO — The primary signal of hassle was the varsity bus that rotated and dropped Momen Yaghi’s daughter again residence moments after choosing her up in Gaza Metropolis on the morning of Oct. 7.
There can be no college that day, no college for a very long time, Momen shortly understood as phrase unfold of the mass killings and abductions carried out by Hamas inside Israel. Battle had formed life in Gaza for generations, however the scale of this assault immediately registered it as completely different.
Others panicked, however Momen, 50, clung to the assumption that his household may trip out the warfare as they’d earlier eruptions, by stockpiling provides and huddling indoors till the bombs stopped.
His miscalculation quickly grew to become clear. Their lives unraveled with lightning velocity.
A midnight journey into northern Gaza reveals a shattered warscape
Momen noticed outdated buddies useless within the rubble of his neighborhood. His spouse, Rania, was engulfed with grief over the lack of a beloved sister. Their teenage daughters started shaking in terror from the relentless explosions.
“Baba,” the ladies pleaded with him, “it’s time to go.”
The household would set out on the identical determined seek for security as a whole bunch of hundreds of different Gaza residents. However Momen possessed a slim blue American passport that meant, in contrast to most of these fleeing, his household may need a approach out.
Their vacation spot was the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
In regular instances, the journey is an hour by automobile. However Momen’s household would face a 10-day trek by way of a post-apocalyptic panorama of tanks, smoldering buildings and rotting corpses, their hearts breaking with every step that carried them farther from residence.
The household of 4 recounted their expertise by way of in depth interviews, and offered emails, paperwork, photographs and movies of their journey — and the life they left behind.
“It’s very scary,” Momen mentioned. “You’re going into the unknown.”
Momen grew up in a home on Mohamed al-Aswad Avenue, a four-story constructing the place members of his prolonged household had flats on completely different flooring, the customized in close-knit Gaza. He left in 1993 to review in North Carolina, touring backwards and forwards for greater than a decade earlier than returning for good to be together with his ailing dad and mom of their closing years.
After they handed, Momen, Rania and their daughters continued to stay within the third-floor unit, which he renovated in 2010. He knew properly the volatility of the battle, the inevitability of Israeli airstrikes. Nonetheless, he changed a wall with massive home windows and arrange what he calls “my station,” a breezy perch the place he may look out over the neighborhood as he loved his morning espresso and cigarettes.
Momen was at his station when information broke of the Hamas assault. He checked his cellphone consistently, becoming a member of neighbors within the rush to purchase bread and canned items. All of them knew what was coming.
The primary strikes in his space arrived earlier than daybreak the following morning, he mentioned, focusing on a Hamas chief who lived close by. Momen’s daughters — Malak, 15, and Noreen, 13 — shrieked when the blast shook their home and a vivid flash illuminated the darkish sky.
“Relax; it’s not us. Don’t fear,” he recalled telling them. “Nothing will occur to us. They’re going to hit Hamas folks, Hamas locations.”
Israeli strikes on Gaza refugee camp provide glimpse of warfare’s destruction
However the strikes didn’t cease, they usually weren’t confined to recognized Hamas places. The bombing was most intense at night time, so Momen organized a spot for the household to sleep with a good friend who lived down the road — in a home with a basement, a rarity in Gaza.
They spent the daytime in their very own residence, the ladies typically sheltering in a closet the place they didn’t really feel the tremors as a lot. They pestered Momen to register with the State Division, on an inventory of U.S. residents searching for evacuation. He did, simply in case, although he was privately uncertain he may get all of them out on a single U.S. passport. And he would by no means go away them behind.
At night time, they retreated to the neighbor’s basement with different households. They laid out skinny mattresses and tried to sleep, however the adrenaline and explosions made it nearly inconceivable. Momen’s daughters stopped consuming. Typically they cried and complained. It was worse, he mentioned, to see them fall silent, eyes huge and palms trembling.
On Nov. 1, throughout a daytime lull, Momen’s youthful daughter, Noreen, noticed the youngsters subsequent door waving to them from throughout the alleyway. She grabbed her cellphone and commenced filming. The nine-second clip reveals two little faces peeking out of a window. One smiles when she sees Noreen, who waves again. Rania reminded her daughters to avoid the home windows.
By dawn the following morning, the kids subsequent door had been useless.
Momen Yaghi’s youthful daughter, Noreen, noticed children subsequent door and waved hiya. The subsequent morning, the kids waving within the video had been useless. (Video: Yaghi household)
The strike that killed them occurred after midnight, Momen recalled. He joined the boys who ran out to assist, however it was pitch-black and treacherous.
They started digging with their naked palms. There have been eight folks underneath the collapsed constructing, they believed, however they solely managed to get well two our bodies.
To retrieve the others, they’d have to attend till dawn, an agonizing prospect as they listened to the wails of the kids’s grandmother.
“Come assist us!” she begged, Momen recalled.
Destruction in Momen Yaghi’s residence in Gaza Metropolis after Israeli airstrikes hit a close-by constructing. (Video: Video and Picture: Yaghi household)
The useless weren’t strangers. They had been his neighbors of 40 years, individuals who wished him properly when he left for America and welcomed him again when he returned. When day broke, Momen noticed one in every of them “in items.”
“It stayed in my head three or 4 days, simply fascinated by it,” he mentioned. “However as a result of we’ve got so many tales, so many incidents, you begin forgetting.”
The blast subsequent door had broken Momen’s own residence so badly that the household had been pressured to maneuver into their neighbor’s basement. He was resourceful, Momen mentioned, and ran strains from one other neighbor’s photo voltaic panels to offer electrical energy for the rising variety of folks hiding out in his basement.
However they started working low on meals. Everybody ate only one meal a day. Rania and the ladies had been buddies with the neighbor’s spouse, so they might spend their days upstairs, having tea and comforting each other earlier than it was time to return underground after the final name to prayer.
Round 9 every night time it was “social gathering time,” Momen mentioned with a dry chuckle. The flash from a strike would arrive earlier than the sound, a terrifying split-second.
“You see the sunshine is coming however you don’t see who’s going to get hit,” Momen mentioned. “Is it us or not?”
Destruction in Momen Yaghi’s neighborhood and residential in Gaza Metropolis after Israeli airstrikes hit a close-by constructing. (Video: Video and Picture: Yaghi household)
Momen weighed their greatest probabilities for survival. Strikes had turned a lot of their district right into a moonscape of knee-high rubble and tangled wires. Electrical energy was almost gone. Momen, who has diabetes, saved taking insulin although it may not be refrigerated.
Throughout this stretch, when cell service flickered on for a couple of minutes, Rania acquired information that her sister Rana had been killed in a strike in one other a part of Gaza alongside along with her 3-year-old son Ahmed and 5-year-old daughter Nisreen.
Rania had adored her niece and nephew. A video of Nisreen from earlier than the warfare confirmed her dancing at a household celebration. Ahmed, whose quick life had entailed surgical procedures for a coronary heart situation, had been blown aside.
“First, they discovered his leg,” Rania recounted, sobbing.
She frightened consistently about the remainder of her household, scattered and unreachable. Rania had nearly no information of her dad and mom or eight surviving siblings. Final she heard, her 73-year-old father, too ailing to flee with the others, was underneath bombardment at a U.N.-run clinic within the north. He advised her he may see Israeli tanks from the window.
“I name him 200 instances for it to attach even as soon as,” she mentioned. “Simply to listen to his voice.”
From the basement, the strikes seemed like they had been getting nearer, although the household mentioned they by no means acquired a warning name from the Israeli navy. Typically a “weak” one hit first — a warning earlier than a heavier blast. Their resolve to remain put was wavering. The neighbor’s spouse packed up her youngsters and left. Her husband stayed.
Gaza turns into ‘a graveyard for youngsters’ as Israel intensifies airstrikes
Their departure could have saved lives. Within the early night of Nov. 2, across the time Rania and the ladies had been often aboveground having tea, a strike hit the home.
A deafening blast shook their hideout. The shock wave, they mentioned, rattled their bones. Smoke poured into the basement, together with water from a burst tank upstairs. Noreen and Malak ran to their dad and mom and clung to them as they placed on masks and wheezed within the darkness.
“We couldn’t breathe,” Momen recalled.
Escaping wasn’t an possibility till dawn. They tried not to consider the worst-case state of affairs: that their exit may be blocked by the pancaked home above them. Their sanctuary, they feared, would change into their tomb.
At daybreak on Nov. 3, the proprietor, Momen and one other neighbor made their approach upstairs and felt the morning air hit their faces. The bomb had ripped by way of the partitions, and the higher flooring had collapsed.
“We checked out one another — me and the proprietor of the home and the opposite man,” Momen recalled. “I advised them, ‘I feel it’s time to depart.’”
The household scrambled to fill backpacks with necessities for his or her escape: a pair adjustments of garments, two sleeping mats, a pillow, their ID playing cards and, most significantly, the U.S. passport.
The one private results Momen took had been his assortment of prayer beads and a skinny stack of photographs from his time in America — snapshots of him lounging by the water on the Outer Banks, as a fresh-faced faculty graduate in cap and robe, on the diner he opened with the hopeful identify New Daybreak. He was proud to change into a U.S. citizen in 2007.
These reminiscences appeared to belong to a special individual, he mentioned, slightly than the sleepless, chain-smoking man who stuffed them right into a bag, steeling himself for an unsure journey.
“You’re taking it step-by-step and also you don’t know something,” Momen mentioned. “The place are you going? What would be the subsequent place?”
Like hundreds of different Palestinians on the lookout for a haven in Gaza, the household determined their first cease can be al-Shifa Hospital, the sprawling medical advanced that had change into a focus of the warfare. A hospital administrator, a nephew of Momen’s, had pledged to take care of them.
How Israel constructed its case to raid Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital
The household piled right into a neighbor’s sedan for the quick drive to the hospital. For the primary time, they noticed the seemingly infinite destruction of their metropolis. Favourite cafes and outlets had been obliterated. Dazed survivors picked by way of particles.
They made it to al-Shifa round midday and lingered within the courtyard till they may observe down Momen’s nephew. Displaced folks had been sleeping in tents, in stairwells, in any patch of area.
Wounded folks arrived by automobile and by donkey cart. Their our bodies had been shredded, bloodied, burned. The morgue was overflowing. A refrigerated ice cream truck had been repurposed to retailer our bodies; Rania was horrified to see a person place his useless baby inside.
Israel struck an ambulance on Nov. 3 close to Gaza Metropolis’s al-Shifa Hospital. The Israel Protection Forces claims the ambulances had been being utilized by Hamas. (Video: Reuters)
About two hours after they arrived, an Israeli strike hit an ambulance simply outdoors the gates of the hospital. A minimum of 15 folks had been killed.
“I used to be fortunate,” Momen mentioned. “I used to be going to get espresso, however I didn’t go to that door. I went to the opposite door.”
He had managed, as soon as once more, to remain a step forward of loss of life.
Momen and his household spent the following week on the hospital. His nephew had secured Rania and the ladies a coveted spot within the medical library, already filled with displaced folks. Momen slept in his nephew’s workplace within the administration constructing.
They survived totally on dates. One man arrange a makeshift stand promoting fava beans and falafel — with out bread — however most households didn’t have cash for that.
The constructing they had been in had potable water for about half an hour a day. “It’s important to hurry and refill in these minutes,” Rania mentioned.
She handed the time by visiting a wounded household good friend within the a part of the compound that was nonetheless functioning, barely, as an emergency room. To get there, she walked previous injured folks mendacity in ache on the ground, heard the screams of sufferers present process surgical procedures with out anesthesia, watched medical employees carry physique components wrapped in fabric.
“All you see are useless folks,” she mentioned. “After which their households come and begin screaming and shouting. A few of them, they misplaced everyone.”
Of their first days there, strikes hit a close-by Italian restaurant and a grocery store car parking zone. Shrapnel flew into the compound. After darkish, the strikes grew louder, nearer. The household mentioned they had been comfortable in the event that they managed to get an hour of sleep every night time.
“We had been scared,” Momen mentioned. “We knew one thing was going to occur.”
Their subsequent objective was to make it throughout Wadi Gaza, the gateway to the southern a part of the Strip, one step nearer to the Egyptian border. Possibly there, Momen figured, they’d have cell reception and will see if the embassy had written with new directions.
They had been following the route Israel had ordered them to journey, however in addition they knew the south had not been spared from strikes. Momen and Rania tried to remain optimistic for the ladies. Pack mild, Momen advised them, only a backpack every. They would depart the whole lot else on the hospital.
No vehicles had been accessible, in order that they set off on foot to the house of Rania’s aunt within the Shabiya district. From there, they took a automobile to a approach station, then a horse-drawn cart to al-Kuwait Sq., the place to begin for essentially the most treacherous a part of the route: Salah al-Din Street, Gaza’s foremost north-south artery.
Males weren’t allowed to hold baggage; Momen was to stroll together with his palms up and eyes down.
Different fleeing households had provided suggestions for survival: Don’t drop something. Don’t assist others. Don’t discuss.
No meals or toilet breaks for the complete four-mile gantlet. No matter you do, they had been advised, don’t cease.
Pause brings new perils as Gazans search household and security
They stepped out onto the street and joined a stream of the displaced; tens of hundreds of households would stroll the identical path. The picture alone was crushing, Momen mentioned, paying homage to black-and-white photographs from the Nakba, or “disaster,” the phrase Arabs use for the pressured displacement of Palestinians throughout Israel’s creation in 1948.
“The scene was stunning, how they humiliated us,” Momen mentioned. “You’re feeling such as you’re leaving your own home, and who is aware of whenever you’ll be again.”
Displaced Palestinians flee south on foot and horse-drawn carts alongside Salah al-Din Street. (Video: Motaz Azaiza/Instagram)
Inside minutes, they reached a cluster of tanks and Israeli forces. At gunpoint, Momen’s daughters noticed Israeli troopers for the primary time of their lives. The forces barked orders on the households.
“Noreen was very shaky,” Rania mentioned of her youthful daughter. “I held her hand and tried to consolation her.”
The household saved their eyes down however it was inconceivable to not see the folks in wheelchairs struggling to maneuver over the uneven, bombed-out path. The mom strolling with two younger youngsters on her again. A person carrying his aged father.
They flinched on the sound of strikes and tried to not gag on the stench of loss of life.
“Focus on the street,” Momen whispered to his horrified daughters.
Israel is detaining civilians in Gaza. Many have disappeared, households say.
At one level, a younger man strolling close to them was plucked from the group and made to strip bare in entrance of the Israeli troopers.
“They wish to present that, ‘We’re going to make you nothing,’” Momen mentioned.
The household hadn’t been in a position to bathe or change garments in over per week. That they had barely eaten. Exhausted and hungry, the ladies requested if they may sit, only for a number of moments. However they needed to maintain going.
Lastly, they reached Wadi Gaza, the wetlands that bisect the Strip.
Crossing into the south had been simple earlier than the warfare. Individuals got here and went on a regular basis. However that day, Momen mentioned, he felt as if we was coming into into one other life.
One line saved flashing by way of his thoughts: “We’re dropping Gaza.”
The household rested briefly and picked up their ideas. A horse cart took them to a good friend of Rania’s father within the metropolis of Deir al-Balah.
Warplanes buzzed overhead however, for the primary time in weeks, Momen mentioned, they felt a measure of security. Now he simply needed to get his household throughout the border. He had been authorised for entry whereas they had been caught on the hospital and wasn’t positive he was nonetheless eligible. Then phrase got here from the U.S. Embassy: Anybody on an inventory since Nov. 1 may go away.
This was their probability. The subsequent morning, Momen, Rania and their daughters mentioned tearful goodbyes to their host and left for the border.
Momen’s abdomen was in knots: “I used to be pondering, ‘How are we going to undergo?’”
The warfare has sophisticated his identification as an American, Momen mentioned. A few of the bombs that fell round him had been U.S.-made; he was pained by the Biden administration’s refusal to hitch worldwide requires a cease-fire. Neighbors, livid after airstrikes, cursed Washington for his or her distress.
“Typically they inform me, ‘Look what the People are doing to us,’” Momen mentioned. “What am I going to say?”
On the Rafah checkpoint, the household moved between the Palestinian Authority workplace and U.S. personnel, whom Momen described as useful and pleasant as they rushed to get Rania and the ladies purple emergency journey passports.
After about seven hours, the household was authorised to enter Egypt. All of them.
It was bittersweet, Momen mentioned. Solely Noreen and Malak had been comfortable. Rania mourned her sister and was distraught on the considered leaving her father.
As they boarded the bus for the ultimate crossing, Momen swallowed exhausting and took one final look behind him. He felt like he was being divided in half. He mentioned a prayer for individuals who couldn’t make it out.
“I used to be saying, ‘Bye, Gaza,’ in my head,” he mentioned. “And I hope to return again someday.”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed to this report.