At least 200 British or dual nationals are trapped under the bombing in Gaza and some of them have desperately launched an SOS directly or through their relatives in the UK, demanding urgent evacuation through the Rafah crossingthe only escape route south of the Palestinian enclave, controlled by Egypt.
The British Government has in fact sent Border Force troops to Egypt due to the possibility that a “humanitarian pause” in Israel’s war offensive would allow the evacuation. “We want to be able to bring them back home,” declared the premier Rishi Sunak. “But it’s something we can’t do immediately, although we are ready to do it as soon as the opportunity arises.”
“We need our Government to help us get out of here, we don’t understand what they are waiting for,” he laments in statements to The Guardian British Nasser Hamid Said, trapped with his wife and two children in Jabalia, north of Gaza. “We have heard many times that they are trying, But what are they really trying to do?”.
Hamid Said, 52, traveled with his family from London to his sister’s funeral in early October, days before the Hamas attacks that left 1,400 dead and Israel’s military offensive that has now left more than 6,000 documented dead. in Gaza, according to Palestinian authorities. “We are in an emergency and I fear for the lives of my children,” he warns from his relatives’ house, where he sleeps under a staircase and fears he will run out of food in a week.
Also in Jabalia is the family of Faras Abuwada, who works as a legal consultant in London and who traveled with his wife and five children to Gaza in September. He returned alone and hoped to bring the family back in October, when conflict broke out. Since then, he has been desperate to be reunited with them and even traveled to Egypt on his own in the hope of being able to wait for them at the Rafah crossing, but the authorities forced him to turn around when he reached Arish, in the north of the peninsula. from Sinai.