Rafah is about 320 kilometers from Cairo. It’s normally a five-hour drive, but Ayyoub said their caravan of buses did not arrive until 11 p.m. Saturday night, after crossing through four checkpoints and other delays. It’s Ramadan, so many on the journey, including Yasmine’s husband, Mohammad Ghanem, were fasting (Yasmine was on her period, and thus exempt).
Along the way, a child exulted upon seeing a banana in a roadside market — it had been months since they’d seen the fruit inside Gaza. “We were all laughing,” Ayyoub recalled. “This is hard for us.”
Abeer, the older sister, had come to Cairo a week earlier with her 4-year-old daughter, Juju, and awaited Yasmine at an Airbnb. “She plays with Juju a lot,” Abeer told me. “Since she arrived, Juju, I don’t know why, she is very attached to Yasmine. ‘Mama, I want to sleep with Yasmine and not with you.’”
They spent the first few days shopping — for pajamas and clothes, for a laptop to replace the one Ghanem, who works remotely in customer service, left behind months ago when the couple first fled Gaza City. On Wednesday, they found an apartment to rent for $600 a month.
“We know hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza who came before her, so we were trying to get in touch with them to see where we should rent,” Abeer explained. “They all live in a compound. You can say that we have a community of people who evacuated, who left Gaza because of the war."
I tried in vain to get a good estimate of how many people have left Gaza since the war began. News organizations and human-rights groups do not seem to be tracking it. In early February, The Times of Israel quoted Egyptian officials saying 35,000 had crossed through Rafah. Abeer said the company Yasmine used has taken about 300 people out each day for the past 90 days, and that they are one of several such companies, charging 10 times the amount for passage as was typical before the war.
“Cairo is the only destination that can take people,” Abeer told me. “You cannot make a visa to Turkey, you cannot go to Dubai because they no longer accept Palestinians. Jordan the same.”
Yasmine said she has been “surprised by the atmosphere” in Cairo, where Egyptians seem to be going about life as normal despite the war raging next door. “They are OK, but we are not OK in Gaza. They live their life as if nothing is happening in Gaza.”
Each night, the sisters connect with relatives back home, sending pictures of the food they have prepared for iftar, the evening meal that ends each day’s fast during the holy month of Ramadan.
“I think she is very overwhelmed,” Abeer said of Yasmine. “She is happy she survived, she is sad the rest of the family is in Gaza. She is so confused about whether they will go back to Gaza or they will look for a new opportunity.
“I told her you have to forget about planning for the future, you are in a transition period, as if you are coming for a vacation,” she continued. “I tell her, at least you are safe.”
