‘People are begging us to feed their children’: Gaza refugees in Cairo find little help

The last thing Rania sold was her jewellery. In the weeks after her family first woke up to heavy shelling in northern Gaza, they lost everything as they journeyed south to escape the bombs. “Wherever we went, the houses would be destroyed,” she says. “We were sent running from place to place.”

After three long months, she found herself in the border city of Rafah parting with her rings, gold bracelets and necklaces to pay the $15,000 “coordination fees” needed to get her family on the evacuation list to leave Gaza.

In January, Rania entered Egypt through the Rafah crossing, the only remaining route out of the coastal exclave. Since war broke out in the wake of the Hamas attack on 7 October, the Egyptian authorities say more than 83,000 people have left Gaza. Most have since travelled to other countries, but activists say there may be thousands of Palestinians sheltering in Egypt, despite the absence of any centralised relief effort. Unlike in neighbouring countries, no UN body has taken responsibility for Palestinians who have fled to Egypt, while Egyptian authorities stand accused of profiting from high border-crossing fees.

Rania and her family are relying on grassroots charities to help them pay for food and rent for an apartment in Cairo. It stands in sharp contrast to her old life when, Rania says, she was the one people came to for support. Her husband earned a good salary working for an aid organisation – they owned two houses, two cars, and her children attended university. The family spent nights out in restaurants and cafes. In the summer, they would drive to the beach.

A week into the war, Israeli forces dropped leaflets on Rania’s neighbourhood giving them 24 hours’ notice to leave the area. The family decided to leave, setting off south, sheltering with strangers on the way. Three weeks into their journey, they were watching the news when they saw that their old neighbourhood had been hit. Their house had been destroyed in heavy bombing that claimed the lives of 20 of her extended family. “Those who survived were disabled,” Rania says. “Some of them lost arms. Some lost legs.”

When people in central Gaza were also ordered to evacuate, Rania’s family continued south, ending up in a tent in Rafah, from where she applied to cross into Egypt. She waited weeks for her request to be granted. Meanwhile, the bombs continued to fall. “People were dying all around us,” she says. “Anyone could die at any moment.”

While travel from Gaza into Egypt was initially orchestrated by multiple agencies charging wildly differing prices, a single company has since emerged with the monopoly on border crossings, charging a flat fee of $5,000 (£4,000) for an adult and $2,500 for each child.

Hala Consulting and Tourism “is now the only way for people to get out of Gaza”, according to one Egyptian activist.

For Layla’s family, Hala’s costs were too high. She too had lived a comfortable life in Gaza, earning good money in sales until the war began. Shortly after bombs started to fall on her neighbourhood, she fled south with her parents and her brothers, but by the time they reached Rafah and contacted Hala to get them across, their savings were gone. “It’s so much money for people who haven’t had work for six months,” she says.

Like many, Layla’s family in Europe launched an online crowdfunding campaign to raise the $25,000 needed for their evacuation. They are now living in temporary accommodation in Egypt. Their efforts to join relatives in Europe have so far come to nothing.

A UK petition to create a family reunification scheme for Palestinians – similar to the one put in place for people fleeing the war in Ukraine – has amassed the required 100,000 signatures needed to trigger a parliamentary debate.

A government spokesperson says: “We are working around the clock to get British nationals who want to leave out of Gaza. We currently have no plans to establish a separate route for Palestinians to come to the UK.”

Layla and Rania say their families have received no help from leading aid organisations. Since 1949, the responsibility for supporting Palestinian refugees has been spearheaded by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa). The UK is among the countries that have frozen funding to the agency after allegations by Israel that some staff members were involved in the 7 October Hamas attacks. A spokesperson for Unrwa declined an interview, saying only that the organisation does not have a mandate to work in Egypt. A spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for refugees also declined to comment.

Dawn Chatty, professor emerita of anthropology and forced migration at the University of Oxford, says she is not surprised by the lack of a coordinated response to Palestinians entering Egypt.

“There is a deep history regarding the UN agencies that take responsibility for Palestinian refugees,” says Chatty, citing common confusion in the limits of their mandates and the heavy politicisation of the issue.

“The Egyptian government is not going to give them asylum,” says Chatty. Granting official asylum to people fleeing Gaza could “destroy” their notional right to return to these lands and could put Egypt “in big trouble with other Arab states”, Chatty says.

Instead, families have had to rely on a network of grassroots volunteers and small collectives, connected by social media and WhatsApp groups.

One volunteer is Amira, an operations manager from Cairo who joined a local group at the outbreak of the war to send food and aid packages to Gaza. Since Palestinians began arriving in Egypt, Amira has focused her efforts on supporting them with food, clothing and accommodation. “People are coming here with nothing,” Amira says. “They are starved and hungry.”

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Rania’s family, who crossed the border with what little they could carry, connected with volunteers in Egypt after seeing a Facebook page offering clothes to people from Gaza. Members of this group put them in touch with a sponsor who is now paying 1,000 Egyptian pounds (EGP) (£16.46) towards her EGP 9,000 monthly rent.

“In some cases, people are literally begging us to help them feed their children,” says Raya, an activist from the UK. She arrived in Egypt earlier this year and helped establish a mutual aid collective, connecting donors in Europe with Palestinian families in need.

In its first 38 days, Raya’s group raised more than $30,000, most of which it flew into the country as cash to be distributed among the 100 families it is supporting for accommodation and medicine. “Some of these families, if we hadn’t walked through the door, we’re not sure if they would have ever received this help,” she says.

Rania says her family is torn. “Life in Egypt is not easy,” she says. “We don’t want to stay here, but we don’t want to leave either. Sometimes we think about emigrating. But whenever we bring up the subject, we all know in our hearts that we just want to return to Gaza.”