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Since the beginning of the warring Gaza, Yusuf Hamash has been a master of good timing and good luck.
We did a story about him a few months ago, and we remind you for a minute who he is.
And how capably he got his family from place to place.
Hamasatex Israel on October 7th.
Yusuf let his home on October 8th, because he was afraid that Jabalya worries from was going to be bombed.
And the next day, October 9th, Jabalya was bombed.
As the war moved, he moved his second time down south to a city called Hanyunas.
Then Israel dropped leaflets from the sky telling everybody to evacuate Hanyunas immediately,
get safety further south in Rafa.
Yusuf packed up the car that day, his wife Minal, his kids, his mom, and it is the third move.
And this is around the time that he started having conversations with one of our producers here,
Hanajafi Wal.
He told Hana that he knew his sisters, they were in Hanyunas, needed also to go to Rafa,
and to get weatling, arguing, pleading, making promises, wearing them down.
And they still did not move.
Until an air strike hit the building next to them.
Terrifying, right?
Yusuf raised to where they were.
And as soon as they saw each other, Yusuf and his sisters shared their relief by being
exactly how they always are with each other.
The first thing I said today when I met them, there is no discussion, we are leaving.
So you didn't like hug them and cry and say I'm so glad you survived, you said.
No, I was, I was, no, no.
We have a different type of relation.
I don't, it's not about hugging, I was laughing.
You should have died.
I should be in the morgue now, I was.
This is how I'm with my sisters.
And did they laugh? What did they say?
Hadir was like, you know, actually they will start to give me orders quickly.
You need to talk to our cousin, I'm glad it's because you were supposed to invite him.
Also go to our auntie, I mean, because they wanted to.
Finally took his sisters to safety in Rafa, in a tent camp that he built for them.
This is back in December.
Every time Yusuf's tent camp of extended family in Rafa grew to 60 people,
with Yusuf managing it as mayor, repairman, caterer, driver, healthcare provider.
And then, on the same day Yusuf's sister, a seal had a baby,
bringing the population of the tent camp to 61.
The Prime Minister of Israel announced he was planning to evacuate Rafa.
And evade the city where Yusuf's family and if we're a million other Palestinians,
we're living.
Yusuf was facing moving everybody for a fourth time.
And he's always been the one who's made this call for his family.
Yusuf's the one who decides.
It's too dangerous to stay where we are.
And this is when we have to go.
It has to be now.
And this is where we're going next.
But this time, Yusuf did know where to go next.
To keep everybody safe and together.
They're going as far south as you can go in Gaza.
The regal might not be another place to run to.
He told Hanaback then.
It's, I, I, I should be honest.
I don't want to think about that because I know this is not solution.
And unfortunately, this time, I'm completely useless.
Because I ran out of options.
So what I'm going to do.
I have never heard you talk like that, Yusuf.
I've never heard you say that you're always the guy that's like,
yeah, I'll figure it out.
I'll call soon.
So tomorrow, no, we don't have it right now.
But I don't have options ahead of me.
When I have options, I'll start to think deeply about it.
But up to now, I'm completely useless.
But the one's one other option.
There's just one that Yusuf had never seriously considered.
They could try to leave Gaza.
Which might seem like an obvious choice that anybody would want to do.
If we the place where bombs are falling,
it's getting harder and harder to find food and drinkable water.
But it's not an obvious choice.
For Yusuf and for lots of people, as you're here.
Today, what happens when Yusuf gets pressed into a fourth move,
when he has deeply mixed feelings about.
It is not even sure he can pull off.
And that's to try to get his family out.
As quickly as possible.
For Israel invades the city where they're living.
Time, he knew, was not on his side.
And if you think you can imagine what that entails,
let me tell you, you really do not know the half of it.
You're about to witness feats of ingenuity, strokes of luck,
and big piles of cash on a deadline against enormous odds.
And also, you'll see how hard it is on this family
to make this decision.
How are you even trying to go?
Tears them up.
Tears us up.
From WBE, Chicago to the American life, I'm our glass.
And with that, I'll turn things over to Hana.
Yusuf did not want to leave Gaza, where he's from.
A place where he knows everyone, knows every system,
has connections everywhere.
His job is doing humanitarian work in Gaza, for gazons.
And his entire family is in Gaza.
A core part of Yusuf's identity is that he takes care of the family.
So Yusuf had no plan to leave, did not even want to think about leaving Gaza.
And then, one day in February, he found out he might leave Gaza.
He was in the car with his wife, Menal, and their kids.
I was going with Menal to her parents,
we were visiting her parents.
I had my daughter, Ilya, five years old, Ilya,
telling me that we are going to travel to Egypt.
That meant to you, they're talking about it during the day,
and she's overhearing it?
Yes.
So I understood that when my daughter came to ask me,
it means that they reach the limits and how else they want to do it.
Yusuf did not realize that a conversation had started among the women and his family.
There wasn't so much happening behind his back as just away from him in the places he wasn't.
Hi, Menal.
Hi.
Menal, I've heard so much about you.
I've heard a lot about you.
Me too, my dear, I've heard a lot about you.
Menal says Yusuf had told her and his mother, he didn't want to leave.
But if they ever wanted to leave Gaza, he would make it happen.
And Menal and his mom said, no, they're whole families in Gaza.
We felt it was wrong to travel and leave them behind.
And Menal knew, like everyone thinking about leaving Gaza knows,
if she left, there was a good possibility she'd never come back.
So no, she said she didn't want to leave, and she meant it.
But then Menal thought, maybe the idea stuck to her.
She thought of it when her children screamed through bombing,
or when they begged for chicken instead of more canned food.
When she noticed Ilya had forgotten all of her alphabet.
And she thought of it when she spent the entire day looking for wood to boil water,
so her kids could drink.
She worried.
What if they ran out of time?
What if these really showed up before Yusuf had another plan?
Then Menal mentioned all of this to one of Yusuf's sisters, Asil.
Asil is the sister who is most like Yusuf, decisive, a problem-solver, a planner.
I went to Asil. She was the first to encourage me.
She said, let the children live a good life.
Go, leave. She encouraged me.
Honestly, Asil is the closest to me because she's been my friend since childhood.
I consider her like a sister.
My favorite friend and the best friend I have.
So I'd like to encourage me to do it that was very good for me,
because she knew what my interests were, and told me my best interest was in leaving Gaza.
I thought we should harden our hearts a bit and leave for the sake of our children.
The process of considering leaving Gaza in this war is not just one of weighing options,
one item after another.
It's also getting people's blessings.
It's a series of permissions.
There was a seal, gave her blessing.
Eventually, the other sisters did too.
Knowing that they were not going to go, couldn't go, they had their own extended families and lives in Gaza.
Yusuf's mom, after some persuading, agreed to go with Manal and Yusuf and the kids.
So, it was decided. Manal told her kids they were going.
And for her, that was the happiest moment.
The relief of being able to say to her kids, this will end for you.
They were excited.
So excited that Elia, the five-year-old, ended up breaking the news to her dad in the car,
before Manal even had a chance to tell him.
So you're thinking about leaving when soon?
And how?
First of all, it's very, very expensive.
Very expensive.
It's a very long process.
It's a very clear process, actually. There's a lot of playing here.
I try to not ignore it, postpone it.
Unfortunately, when I think about the decision itself, I get lost quickly because there is loads of details behind that decision.
It's really difficult.
But making that decision is not getting alone with my personality at the end.
It's not getting along with your personality?
Yes, 160 days of war.
And that wasn't enough to raise the idea in my head that I should leave Gaza.
Leaving, he now.
It's kind of...
I'm scabbing my responsibility towards my sisters, my responsibility towards my job, my responsibility towards my friends who I'm supporting.
But I'm standing ahead, my responsibility towards my children.
It's very...
Very... I don't know.
It's very difficult decision if you put these two responsibilities in front of you and you have to choose.
This was March.
Israel continued to say,
Our plan is to invade Rafa.
He agreed it was the right choice for his children.
And yet, everything about how this move was happening was different, slower than 19-use of act through the entire war.
Not that he was stalling.
He made some calls, he was going through the steps. But old Yusuf would have made a thousand calls, checking all the angles, calling in favors, urgently reading everything available about what Israel might do next and when.
And now, this Yusuf did not sound like a person who knows there may only be a small window to make your next move.
And it's easy to be too late.
But for me, to be honest, I'm not thinking about it deeply.
And I'm very sorry. And I know it's a wrong way, but for me, the only thing that I can do is to keep avoiding thinking about it until it became more closer.
I will do it. I'm starting the process and all of that.
Yeah, it's very long process. Very complicated process.
Yusuf couldn't talk about the process, how they'd get out on the record.
He worried, justifiably, that any public statement could jeopardize their chances of getting out.
What he could say was that he had paid to register his family to leave, and that at some point, his family's names would appear on a list of people allowed to cross the Rafa border.
But when that would happen, unclear.
Another week passed, then another.
Those blessings, Manal had collected from everyone in the family.
They meant it, but the longer this weight went on, the blessings got a little worn.
Yusuf started seeing it when he checked in on his sisters.
One of the incidents happened, we had an issue between my sister.
One of my sister's husband and when I went there, I had two yani.
I sold the issue there and I found out that my sisters were complaining.
No, so he's leaving us here with, in the circumstances, blah, blah, blah, and they were a bit annoyed.
So I was like, okay, now you were pushing for that, and now you are objecting that.
Then I found out that it's a moment that they were angry and all of that.
It's fine. I know how they feel about it, and I know how they are skilled.
And I believe they have the right to be scared.
It does seem like guilty. It makes me feel guilty, but I am already guilty from the beginning.
You already feel guilty.
He was not doing his job, keeping them safe and together.
But while he waited, Yusuf really did try on the safety front.
He threw himself in to making sure his sisters would be okay without him there.
He lined up a million backups, a guy with a car, in case they needed to leave quickly,
a guy to help with broken phones, with internet problems.
He told friends, I'm going to be calling on you. You need to look out for my sisters.
He set up a contact at a currency shop so he could send money from Egypt.
And he stashed emergency cash with several different people he trusted.
Yeah, there is a lot of things had to be put in place and to be designated for someone
because I found out that I was doing a lot of things.
You have definitely been doing a lot of things.
I would think you would need at least a dozen people to do all the jobs you've been doing.
I believe a hundred people would never do the job with love and passion as I was doing it.
It was always part of, give me energy always when I am managing things for them.
That's the difference between me doing the job and a hundred people doing the job.
President Biden was warning Israel not to invade Rafa.
26 EU countries issued a statement saying an invasion of Rafa would be catastrophic.
Yousuf continued to wait. They continued to be bombings, drones, gunfire all the time.
But also something new that Yousuf noticed happening around him in Rafa and at the family's temp camp.
A slow motion collapse.
Every day Yousuf would notice a new deterioration of just daily life.
There was no trash pickup, no police or services, nobody regulating traffic or businesses.
There was no governance.
One day he'd got a call that someone's mother-in-law used the shower when it wasn't her family's day.
And by the time Yousuf arrived, the conflict had exploded.
Or another day.
So my brother-in-law had a fight with one of the neighbors.
And my two brothers-in-law beating that guy and insulting him in a bad way.
And it happens that he's a friend of mine.
And that was difficult.
They had to intervene between both of them, apologizing here and there trying to find out to be mediated between them.
What they fight about?
Small children had a fight. They went to speak with him.
He didn't like that way. He responded.
It resulted in any clashes by hands.
Today I have another one with one of the other brother-in-law Ahmad, with another neighbor, for another stupid reason.
The circumstances and what we are going through is pushing us to become unstable mentally.
And we are going to be able to move to the other side of the world.
And we are going to be able to move to the other side of the world.
And we are going to be able to move to the other side of the world.
And now it's a little common. We see people with guns, a lot of disputes between families, a lot of killing crimes, looting.
And that's affecting the entire society itself. People are fighting for no reasons now.
And a few days ago we had one of the water truckings. They had a lot of humanitarian organizations have brought water truckings.
They are drinking water by trucks to these areas.
We had a small dispute on the line where people put their jury cans in line. A small dispute that resulted in seven people killed.
What happened?
It was not there, but I was hearing the shooting and it snuck us directly. It's like a hundred meters away.
And what turned that fight is just a small line in front of drinking water.
That's one of the things that pushing me to...
No, I have to risk my children from that. But you've seen Israeli bombs destroy homes. You've seen much more dramatic than that. Why did that get to you?
That's a good question. It heals difference when you look to it as your own people. I don't justify for the Israelis what they're doing and what they're committing.
In Gaza, but with all that grishing that they're doing, it's a bit different. The way you see it, when you see it among your own people.
But societies can easily be fragile and have destroyed like our societies destroyed now.
Seven weeks after Israel announced plans to invade Rafa, Yusuf and Manal were still waiting.
Every night they would check a telegram channel called the Landport Rafa Crossing. Around 10 p.m., it would post screenshots of a printed list of names.
You'd have to zoom in on the photo. And if your name was on that list, you knew to show up at the Rafa Crossing the next day.
You'd been granted permission to cross. 300 sometimes 400 people a day.
Yusuf and Manal's names were never listed. But Yusuf started seeing the names of people he knew had registered not long before him showing up on the list.
By the end of March, he told me, it must be close.
How are you feeling?
It's happening. I feel excited for that. You feel excited? Yeah, I'm afraid and excited at the same time.
I'm going for nowhere. I'm abandoning a lot of things here in Gaza. My social status, my value, my job, my career.
So to Anujani and unfortunately until now, I don't have any heart-pising what I'm going, what's the plan?
I'm surprised to hear you say you're excited. And excited in a weird way. Okay, it's like I wanted to happen.
And it's like when you are going to get an idyllot. That there is a pain that you'll go through it. And I just want to do it with us.
Like when you're getting a shot and you just want it to be over. Yeah, exactly.
So that's not really excited. That's like dread. I don't know. That sounds more like...
No, it's not my language. That sounds more like dread to me than excitement.
Nervous. Nervous maybe. It's kind of... I just want to do it with halos. Before I did the registration, I was like,
okay, with it, I didn't think about it a lot. But since I registered, it became like a pain that seems like I just want to finish it.
I just want to be on the other side already of whatever is going to happen.
Exactly.
What is this? This weight to be placed on a list? What is this? And you have to pay to get on the list? Why?
There were, at the time, over a million people living in a city that was about to be invaded.
There was one way out of Gaza. I wanted to understand what was this opaque process that Yusuf was waiting on and could barely talk about.
Honajafi wall. Coming up, the actual price to get somebody out of Gaza.
And yes, they're going to want that in cash. The wire transfer, no credit card, no bubble payment. Good old-fashioned cash only.
That's in a minute. I'm just going to give up a video when our program continues.
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Hi, I'm Wendy Dore. I'm an editor with New York Times Audio.
For me, the magical thing about audio is how it can take you closer to somebody else's life.
You feel like you're getting to know somebody that you might never normally meet.
And the New York Times Audio app is all about bringing those voices to you with new stories to explore every day.
Download the New York Times Audio app at nytimes.com slash audio app.
You'll need a news subscription to listen.
It's American Life Myruglass. Today's show.
We're returning to Yusef Hamash and his family in Marafa.
We've been caught up in this war that began October 7th when Hamas crossed into Israel,
killed nearly 1200 Israelis and took over 240 hostages.
And it's dragged on for nearly nine months now of a 37,000 Palestinians and over 1500 Israelis dead.
And people like Yusef and his sisters trapped in the middle of the fighting.
And back in February, when Yusef decided to try to leave Gaza, leave others behind.
It was hard getting everybody on board, handing off responsibilities.
But also, it was just literally hard to leave. It was hard to get out.
Yusef was cautious when it came to talking about this part of the process. So Hamas started asking around.
How exactly does it work? How did a person get out of Gaza with the clock ticking?
Everybody wondering when and if Israel was really going to do what it announced it was going to do and actually invade Rafa?
What procedure do you go through? Who do you call with form to your fill out to leave Gaza?
Here's Hamas.
You know it's not a clean, defensible operation when nobody who touches it will talk about it.
I spoke with Palestinians who went through the Rafa crossing or were trying to, people who've reported on the system, people who work inside it.
Almost everybody didn't want to talk publicly.
They all worried about pissing off the wrong people in the Egyptian military and intelligence.
The first detailed document I read about how the Rafa crossing works was an investigation by a group of reporters at a site called the organized crime corruption and reporting project.
And even they, the people who authored the report did not want to be named.
You can just say that I'm one of the OCCRP reporters who worked on this investigation.
There were several reporters working inside and outside Gaza. I'm going to call this one Naya. Naya explained, after October 7th, when Hamas attacked Israel, officially Palestinians and Gaza with no other passport were not allowed to leave through the Rafa border.
Israel closed every other exit point.
But pretty soon, these ads started popping up online, offering to get people out. They were for brokers, people calling themselves travel agents or travel coordinators.
Naya pulled up a couple of the ads while we were talking. Travel in luxury. Your dignity and pride intact.
And really, I mean, it's like they're so creepy and tacky at the same time. I mean, wait, let me see if I can find it.
It was very funny.
Okay, there's one called the Kings Coordination. It says the strongest coordination on the level of Gaza.
And then it says easy and guaranteed. And it has a photo of these things and then a plane over that things.
And then a guy looking very modern, you know, wearing a Rukzak on his back and orange jeans. It looks so funny.
Why is that so funny to you?
Because I mean, the country is, I mean, Gaza is a place of death and destruction. And this thing is next to him and the plane flies over this thing.
Like he's going to see the pyramids with his camera around his neck.
He's nothing to do with the reality.
Every war has its own manic economy.
These travel coordinators were sometimes charging $2,500 per person, sometimes $5,000,
dependent who you asked and when. You could send the money from your phone or hand it to a coordinator in Gaza.
As Beth Naya and the other OCCRP reporters could find out a lot of the money seemed to go to Egyptian intelligence,
although Egypt has publicly denied this.
And the price rose over time. A few months after the war started, we called one of the brokers ourselves and asked,
what exactly is the price now? And he said, sometimes at 7,000, 10 or 12, $12,000 per person, an astounding number.
Before the war started, the average person in Gaza made $3,700 a year.
It was very difficult for Palestinians trying to leave to tell who was legit or to price shop.
People gave their money to brokers who disappeared. It was the Wild West.
And then the entire system changed.
Egypt controls the Rafa crossing.
Here are some things Egypt did not want.
Egypt did not want Israel pushing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt.
It didn't want a refugee crisis. It didn't want Hamas getting a foothold in Egypt.
Egypt also didn't want to look like it was supporting the displacement of Palestinians by facilitating their exit out of Gaza.
And last, Egypt definitely did not want to look like it was collaborating in a black market to charge Palestinians tens of thousands of dollars to save their lives.
By the beginning of this year, it did look like that.
By February and March, there were reports that the main company offering travel coordination at the Rafa border was making a million dollars a day off Palestinians.
The Manic Economy was reigned in.
New rules. No more hiring brokers in Gaza to help you register to leave.
No more paying by phone. No more free-for-all bribes at the border.
There would only be one company allowed to register people to leave Gaza.
An Egyptian company called Hala with close ties to the Egyptian military and security services.
And now, if you wanted to register, you needed to send someone to the Hala offices in Cairo, in person.
And not just anyone, a first degree relative.
And you need to pay in cash. $5,000 for an adult, $2,500 for a kid.
American dollars only.
It's like a dare. How could anyone in Gaza pull this off?
This new system for getting out of Gaza kicked in just as Israel announced its plans for an offensive in Rafa.
Just as Minal told Yusuf, she was ready to leave.
A new, much more rigid system that made it much, much harder to get out.
Yusuf couldn't talk about how he raised that much money in dollars and got it to the Hala office in Cairo.
And how he did it fast enough to register to get on the list in order to maybe make it out in time.
Most Palestinians in Gaza didn't want to talk about any of that either.
So I reached a Palestinian outside of Gaza on the West Bank.
Okay, so first we set up the GoFundMe page and that was a whole thing, an ordeal of itself.
I knew this system was outrageous, but I didn't know, no, until I talked to Bushra.
Bushra, Khalidi, lives in the West Bank in Ramallah.
She's Palestinian. Her husband's family is from Gaza.
And Bushra wanted to help them get out.
Seven people, $30,000, which she didn't have and had to fundraise.
So I couldn't say in my GoFundMe page that I lived in Palestine because Palestinians are not allowed to receive any funds from GoFundMe.
And they actually emailed me and said, you know, because you're in a risky area, blah, blah, blah, like you cannot, you know.
And then I had a co-sponsor with me from the US.
Eventually I found somebody, I found a, it's quite a long story.
Short version, she needed someone else to help her set up the GoFundMe page.
And the way she found that person, her brother-in-law is in a band that tours and knew someone in the US who could help them set up the page.
Pretty quickly, talking to Bushra, I got a picture that this is the kind of person you need on your team if your family has any chance of getting out.
Bushra is a lawyer. She speaks perfect English.
She works for a global NGO, Oxfam. She's used to navigating bureaucracies in multiple languages.
She has connections in countries all over the world. To navigate this complex process, you need someone who can make things happen.
You need a Bushra or a Yusuf. Apparently you also need to know someone who's in a band.
So that was the first hurdles. And then it was a hurdle to write the story because every time you wrote the story, it has to be verified by GoFundMe.
And then they would allow it or not. So they weren't allowing it me mentioning that I lived in Palestine.
So we had to change the story, but we didn't want to lie. You know what I mean?
So we had to change the story. You say that I kind of lived between Europe and Palestine and kind of travel for work.
I do travel a lot. It had to be, we had to write the story in terms of she was fundraising on behalf of me that lived in Europe who was going to help my family in Gaza.
So GoFundMe worked, but it wasn't enough. They raised $20,000. They needed 30 for the halifes.
Bushra and her husband were already sending money constantly into Gaza. Money to pay for $200 bags of flour. For transportation, every time the family had to move.
Five times. Bushra knew if the family made it to Cairo, they wouldn't be allowed to work. So they need help paying for housing and food there too.
So actually, Bushra realized they needed $50,000.
So we took a loan out of 20k and then put our savings 20k.
Okay. Yeah. All my all our life savings.
How did you guys make that decision? Was that an obvious choice?
That also was what delayed the process is like we're currently in like we bought a house a year ago.
We're like finishing it. So I mean, it's just been it's been a huge financial strain.
I talked to people in Gaza who sold the cars they were living in to pay for these fees.
I heard about families that sold their furniture, took out loans, families who hit up aunts and cousins and extended family across multiple countries until every family member savings was drained.
And once you did that, had the money in hand. It wasn't over.
The move for us that was really complicated was finding was figuring out a way how to get the money in because you have to pay cash in dollars in Egypt and in order for you to you can't send the money by banks transferred to an Egyptian account.
It has to be like somebody in Egypt that has a USD account and we will wait.
What? So you have to have you have to have you can't transfer money to an account.
No, it's like $40,000 to Egypt.
I couldn't figure out literally just how to get the cash there.
How do we get the 40,000, 40K in?
Well, the thing is is that I could have flown out and taken it. But then we found out that it has to be a first degree relative that registers.
Do you see what I mean?
I have to register the family. It has to be and I'm not a first degree. I'm just like the in law. I'm like this, the daughter in law.
So I couldn't and then my husband Palestinian men under 40 years old can't enter Egypt unless you have a specific.
You have to have like a permit from the Egyptian authorities and secret services and they do all the security checks.
So that was also not an option for my my husband to go.
Oh my god.
That's a be his sister in Sweden.
Yeah, so we flew her out and her her daughters and her husband to because she was like two small very small kids.
So we flew them all out and there like his situation is not.
Amazing in Sweden. They couldn't afford like $2,500 for the plan tickets. So we put it for those two.
Oh god. Now I'm talking about one of my counting all of this. I'm just I can't believe once the sister arrived in Cairo.
Bousher then had to figure out how do I get her the cash so she can go in person to register the family at the Hala office.
Bousher had a friend in Egypt.
He could receive about 20,000 in his account.
So I was like, okay, all transfer 20,000 to him.
And then we sent him there was a person. I'm not exactly sure. And again, I'm not asked questions.
But he was like, I don't want to say an agent, but he was like a person that was going to Egypt, a businessman going to Egypt that was taking money for people dollars to Egypt for people.
So he carried 15,000 for us. No way.
Yeah, it basically we paid him $1,500 to take $15,000 with him.
And just to be like the mule, just to carry it basically.
Yeah, it was risky. That was a risky move.
And did you get the sense that that person is doing that like all the time?
Yeah, but I don't think it was for necessarily evacuating people from Gaza. It's just he's a businessman.
He has like businesses and Cairo. So he was able to carry.
I don't know. I don't know what he does, but he's like an entrepreneur.
I have no details.
I didn't part. I didn't ask. I was like, cool. We got something.
My husband didn't really ask. He knew the guy. He knew the guy from a guy. So like he was like, okay, cool. He didn't ask questions.
Okay. So your sister-in-law arrives in Cairo. She goes to meet your friend who's holding $20,000 for you and the businessman who has personally delivered for quite a high fee.
Another $15,000. Yeah. And all of that. Then she collects that like driving around Cairo.
These like piles of cash literally.
Well, yeah, I guess I mean, is it piles of cash? It's like $315,000.
No, so it's not. That's a lot of cash. I mean, it's not a security. It's pretty quite.
It's not. You can't put it in a wallet. No, you can't put it in a wallet.
That's a good question. I should. How was she carried in?
But they know. So they got an apartment right next to the company.
The Hala company. The sister-in-law stood in line, paid the money, and then they waited for the names of Boucher's and Laws to show up on the list.
Boucher and her family were stuck checking the same strange telegram channel use of was the one with the screenshots of this life or death list.
The wait was excruciating. Boucher didn't want to think or talk about it.
Her sister-in-law wanted to talk about it all the time. They were all watching the news and the list.
On April 14th, their names appeared on the list. The family left the next day.
I mean, definitely when their names came out on the list, it was like a physical.
There was something physical that changed in me.
What did it feel like? What changed?
It's like, okay, they're going to survive. They're going to live.
There's no word for it in English, but maybe you can look it up.
In Arabic, it's called, it's like a mix of anger and disgust.
It's like a mix of anger, disgust, and despair.
And you found that to what made you feel like which part?
How, I mean, listen, I had never met my in-laws.
Never met her in-laws because Israeli restrictions make it very hard to travel between the West Bank and Gaza.
How is it that this has to happen for us to meet and for my son to meet his grandparents for the first time?
How? Why? Why do we have to go through this?
What is it going to mean to your family to have spent this money on this?
Like long term or shame? Shame.
Shame? What do you- why?
Because they're ashamed. Because that's not who we are.
Like we've been rendered destitute. They're not destitute people.
They had a beautiful home and beautiful lives.
And to put that on your son, I don't know if it's shame, but it's guilt maybe.
It's like they're so grateful that they're ashamed to say it.
You know what I mean? It's embarrassing that they put that on us.
And so we don't talk about it. It's not like there's a thank you.
Because even a thank you is not enough for them. And so it's better not to say it.
Do you want to talk about it?
No. Because I would do it a million times over again.
And I know that. I just need to know that they're alive and they're good.
And now, you know, I mean, the thing is, is that they're in Egypt now.
I'm in Egypt now. But the road ahead is so hard and like coming here and like just seeing them.
Like they're not the same people. They never will be the same people.
You know?
This brings us back to you, Syf.
You Syf. Who knew this?
He knew leaving Gaza meant he would not be the same person.
And still, you Syf was going through all these steps, through a system designed to frustrate, deter, and bankrupt him.
You Syf's version of this process, raising an astounding amount of money, getting the cash in dollars physically to the Hala office.
You Syf's maneuvers were not the exact same as Bhushra's, but they were just as involved and absurd.
Right up until he was registered and waiting for permission to do something he did not want to do.
When he was growing up, Yusuf's uncle Yusuf's telling him he reminded him of his grandfather.
He grew up hearing this a lot, the similarities to his grandfather.
And Yusuf got it. His grandfather hustled, made things happen.
He was resourceful.
But Yusuf has been thinking about this lately. What it meant to be like his grandfather. What else it meant.
His grandfather is the one who got everyone to Jabalya, to the refugee camp in the north of Gaza, when they were all pushed out of their homes, in what is now Israel in 1948.
His grandfather is the one who made sure everyone got set up in the same place next to each other, made sure they survived, had housing, had their needs met.
He made sure they were safe and they were together. And they were.
Jabalya camp became a small city.
People moved to bigger apartments nearby, had kids, but the family stayed safe and right next to each other.
75 years later, Yusuf was the one who moved to sisters and their families to a tent camp in Rafa, so they could all be nearby, safe and together.
They were there for three months.
When Yusuf heard from a contact in Egypt, a friend with connections at the Hala company, who told them that his family's names were likely to be listed in the next week.
He wasn't just failing at keeping the family together. He was the one who was going to split them up.
Yusuf, are you packing?
I don't have anything to back.
That's the easiest thing ever.
That's the easiest part.
I have two jeans pants, two t-shirts, two jackets, and actually most of it, I will leave it for my brother's law.
I'm just going to take just what I could wear during the first day, just a big drama for the next day.
The easiest part is packing.
What's the hardest part?
It's also packing.
Tengebly, there is nothing to be back during the journey, but we are packing our relations with our families now.
I don't know how it's going to be that day when we are just going out.
I don't want to really think about that moment because I don't know how it's going to be.
It's going to be difficult. I don't want to think about it. Let's wait and see.
Hi Yusuf.
Hello, Hannah.
Hi. How's your day, Ben?
I don't know. It was a bit long and 10.00 with our name listed by the Egyptians across tomorrow to leave to Egypt.
Wow.
I wasn't expecting that soon.
I was looking to my sisters today. I received the news when I was with my sisters. It was really difficult to be with it.
You were with your sisters when you found out?
The name was list because they list the names usually after 10pm in the night.
So we were there having a gift. I was going to see the address of my sisters, Hibram Hadil.
I have a friend who lives in Egypt and he has some access with the Hello Company, which is the company that we just start through it to cross to Egypt.
He told me that my name is not listed. It's not going to be listed today. So I don't need to wait for the list. It's going to be listed for tomorrow.
So I decided we were having a start with my sisters. I told them that we are leaving the day after. I wanted to use that day.
We agreed to have a start together with all of us. We were planning for tomorrow that even I don't want to go to work.
I was spending with my sisters. I took my family there. We spent the entire day there.
We went back to prepare ourselves to travel and suddenly when we were there, one of the wife of one of our colleagues who lives with us, he called and she said your names are listed.
I was very shopping and I became suddenly leaving and became a chaos.
I was crying and it was a very emotional moment that I didn't want to see. My daughter, Ilya, was crying because her hands are crying. My wife is crying. My mother is crying.
And then I found myself in this chaotic situation trying to understand if it's the right option or not.
You were having doubts? You know, I, yeah, of course. I'm going for nowhere, leaving behind me everything, an entire life.
And this is the second time I'm leaving things behind. I lift my house on the north towards the south. I lift my house, my memories, everything in the north.
Now I can, I'm trying to understand or to imagine how my sisters are feeling when they are losing their backup, their supporter, whenever they want anything, whenever they are facing anything. They know that you're sitting there.
What did they say, you said, what did they say to you?
Everyone was in a shock, including me. Everyone was crying and I was looking to my sisters. I felt how weak I am to make that decision. I don't have that enough courage to leave everything behind.
This is one of the hardest moments in my life.
Yeah.
When I was looking for my sisters, where they are thinking about losing their entire family. It's not only me, it's my wife, my children, their mother.
I couldn't find the right word. What should I say?
The issue is that I was very overwhelmed emotionally.
If I said, it happened. When I started to talk to them, I was trying to show how strong I am and I was like, it's fine.
You are in some time formed, you will be prepared for this moment. Here where I lost control of my emotions.
I was usually that tough man who cannot be seen as a weak person. I understood how weak I am.
I don't want to be shown weak in front of them, but it's out of my head. My sisters, I believe they know that I will do anything for them.
I already prepared everything.
You told me over the last month that every time I asked how you feel about leaving, I don't know. Do you feel like you are suddenly thinking about it now?
I was postponing thinking about it because I understood how hard it is. I was doing right. I was doing right today when I received the news and I'm knowing that I'm leaving tomorrow.
I never felt the pain inside me back today. I was right. I was right. Now it's happening. I'm leaving gas towards losing my identity.
When are you leaving? I'm leaving 7 a.m. in the morning.
You're leaving in 6 hours. Yeah, I am leaving. Are you going to sleep?
I don't know if I could manage to sleep. Because the morning at 7 a.m. I have to go to meet my sisters again before we leave.
I want to make sure, even if I have one more minute to spend with them, I'll do it. I don't know. I'm going through one of the most difficult decisions I made in my entire life.
I know.
Now I'm just leaving everything. Now I am leaving. I would be refugee once again. Born as a refugee, raised as a refugee.
Now starting a new life as a refugee.
You so I want to let you go have time with your family and also hopefully sleep some before you have to make that trip tomorrow.
Thank you, Hannah. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Our next call will be from a different place. Yeah. Hopefully it will go okay.
Alright, bye, Yusuf. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Yusuf left through the rough accrossing the next day. That day his family saw the world outside Gaza for the first time.
The kids were amazed by the electricity in Cairo and the trees. Trees in Gaza have been cut down now to use for fire. When Ilya and Afghma had started to tell their cousins in Gaza about the watermelon they were eating and the playground they played on, Yusuf had to tell them to keep that kind of thing to themselves from now on.
Manal took the children to the market and bought chocolate. Yusuf sat at the computer continuing to try to make plans for his sisters trying to figure out where were the Israeli tanks now? What might their approach into Rafah be? What was the intensity of the bombing that day? And what did it mean?
Were the NGOs leaving Rafah yet? Or other people leaving? What's it time for his sisters to move somewhere else in Gaza?
Then on May 6th the Israeli military sent tanks into Rafah. The invasion had finally started. That same day there was news that Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire. It was very confusing but for a couple hours it seemed like maybe there was going to be a ceasefire.
I was very very excited and hyped and it was like what to do. Now I start to think about what I'm going to do with the families. I should go back to Gaza. Now I need a high start even to look at the process to go back together as soon as I get.
What? Really? My thick one, two weeks? Yeah. I'm usually here. Why do I'm doing here? Watching the news, lighting reports. I want to be there. The only option for me is to go back to Gaza.
I need to know with my sisters I can just drop them in the car and we keep running in Gaza from up to the other. I don't mind this.
Yusuf was suddenly back to the person I remembered talking to for every other move before this last one. Energized, frantic.
I start to think rationally about what I'm going to happen, what I'm going to do. And I will need the plan that I'm having now.
I still get it out of the way. I'll come back. But that day there was no ceasefire. And the next day the Israeli military seized the Rafa crossing into Egypt and closed the border. There was no way back.
Yusuf would be in one world. His sisters would be back home in another.
Hanachafi Walz is one of the producers of our show.
Hanachafi Walz is one of the producers of our show.
Hanachafi Walz is one of the producers of our show.
Hanachafi Walz is one of the producers of our show.
Hanachafi Walz is one of the producers of our show.
Hanachafi Walz is one of the producers of our show.
Hanachafi Walz is one of the producers of our show.
