By Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Alexander Cornwell, Maayan Lubell
Cairo/Ramara/Israel-Gaza Border (Reuters) – Over a year, Israeli authorities have stopped Ayoub from escaping hunger and war in Gaza with his family to get academic fellowships in France. He finally left last month after Israel unexpectedly relaxed its tight control over its borders.
Ayoub, whose wife and their four children are about 1,000 Palestinians, have been relaxing the rules in recent months, leaving Gaza after Israel relaxed its rules from enclaves to boarding flights from enclaves to Europe and elsewhere.
“The situation in Gaza has become unbearable,” said the 57-year-old engineer. His return was part of the 115 Gaza people accepted by France in April.
The new resignation requires foreign governments to demand from Israel, and its number remains relatively small.
Reuters cannot determine why Israel has now allowed more Palestinians to leave Gaza, an international outcry over the humanitarian conditions there. However, the easing of restrictions is similar to the Israeli government's stated goal of promoting the resettlement of Gaza's population in other countries.
For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the topic of mass resettlement by Palestinians from Gaza has helped support from far-right allies who oppose further truce with Hamas and hope to rebuild Jewish settlements there.
Interior Minister Moshe Arbel has recently departed Gaza to European countries in order to temporarily and voluntarily evacuate the Gaza Strip to rebuild its reconstruction, a process he said was inspired by Donald Trump.
The Republican U.S. president has proposed to develop the enclave into a coastal resort without Palestinians.
“I thank President Trump for his reflection on this important initiative,” Arbel said on April 1 after overseeing the flight to Germany. “Together, we will turn this place into a paradise. Let us succeed with the help of God.”
His spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. France still opposes forced displacement of the Gaza people after the evacuation of Ayoub's family as part of it. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that Trump's ideas could constitute ethnic cleansing.
Despite Abel's comments, five Israeli officials told Reuters that easing restrictions was not a direct response to Trump's Gaza proposal or part of any such plan. Instead of trying to reduce Gaza’s population, Israel responds to growing demands from countries seeking to help people reach safe destinations, an Israeli official said.
For many Palestinians, the opportunity to move is filled with echoes of historical deprivation of land. Ayoub and the people who recently left told Reuters that they left were only temporary. But, according to a recent Palestinian poll, the population of people has been greatly displaced and relied on reduced aid supplies in most areas, according to a recent Palestinian poll.
Policy has also intensified pressure on Gaza’s population since Israel violated a fragile six-week ceasefire on March 2, even as we and Arab mediators push the war to end.
The risk of famine worsened under a two-month lockdown of all Israel’s aid delivery to Gaza. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, it re-exploded the bombing campaign, killing 464 people last week. Two days after Trump ended his Gulf National Tour, it launched a new “widespread” land offensive on Sunday.
Israel also said it would ease the lockdown on Sunday and allow limited aid.
Netanyahu praised Trump’s thoughts on Gaza but quoted a major obstacle: “We have a problem – we need to accept the states,” he told Gaza war veterans on Tuesday. Neighbors Jordan and Syria – with a large Palestinian refugee population for decades – Egypt is reluctant to absorb a large number of gazans.
In this story, Reuters spoke with five Gazaians who recently left with nine diplomats and seven Israeli officials to establish details about the impact of new rules surrounding Gaza's exports.
Foreign diplomats said Israel began notifying foreign governments late last year that they would soon ease restrictions before Trump took office and made his proposal. Diplomats demanded that they remain anonymous because they had no right to talk to the media.
Easy restrictions came into effect largely at the beginning of this year. The diplomats involved said it would now take several days or months to approve requests from Palestinians as foreign citizenship, their relatives and foreign scholarship recipients. They added that among those allowed to leave now, Palestinians have previously refused to withdraw on Israel's security grounds.
The Israeli Prime Minister's office, the Ministry of Defense and its Cogat branch coordinated with the Palestinians and did not answer Reuters' questions about the scope or justification for the recent easing of restrictions. Hamas urged Gazaians not to participate in any relocation offer, and he said it is looking at reports of mitigating restrictions.
Gaza
According to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, Gaza's population has dropped by about 160,000 during the war. More than 53,000 residents were killed, and the rest were left, including medical emergencies. Others have been able to leave through expensive systems involving Egyptian brokers.
During the war, thousands of foreign nationals fled, but it became even more difficult once Israel took over the intersection of Rafah and Egypt and implemented an almost complete closure of the Gaza border.
In late March, the Israeli government established a new agency that will help Gazans who want to resettle in third countries. Reuters cannot determine whether the department is operating.
Reuters cannot be sure how many people can leave under the new standard. Three diplomats estimated at least a thousand diplomats, and several said they could only identify their citizens and count them in numbers of hundreds.
Israeli authorities did not answer questions about the numbers.
All diplomats say most exports have been brought to Gaza in Gaza since March.
Israeli human rights group Gisha, advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement, said Israel's easing of restrictions was “partial, inconsistent and non-transparent” and believed that more people should be allowed to leave.
“In fact, it seems that the choice of 'promotion' is a selective and limited response to international pressure and legal action,” Gicsha spokesman Shai Grundberg told Reuters.
The group estimates that thousands of Palestinians still in Gaza have foreign citizenship, right of residence, student visas or eligibility to enter a third country through a family uniform visa or similar scheme.
'We'll be back'
Only a small percentage of Gaza people meet the current Israeli standards. For those who do this, the choice is not easy.
Many fear that leaving the land would lead to another “Nakbar” or disaster, when thousands of Palestinians were deprived of their homes in the 1948 war between the Arab state and the newly formed state of Israel. Many people who hope to return within a few weeks are still refugees.
“We will return to Gaza as soon as possible once conditions allow,” said Dunia al-Amal Ismail, a 53-year-old widow poet.
Ismail received a seat in the same French academic program that helped researchers, artists and their families get out of conflict zones.
Those who left faced a dangerous journey, passing through the enclaves, scattered with unexploded rockets and shells. Palestinians were collected by vehicles before dawn and taken to Israel-operated border crossings, where they were under Israel's security checks before being processed by foreign diplomats, Reuters said.
Israel only allows those who leave each small bag. Four diplomats said they were under Israeli military escort to the Jordanian border.
Diplomats realized the serious food scarcity and brought sandwiches and drinks to those who left Gaza.
A diplomat said a Palestinian man had a chicken sandwich and he commented that he forgot the taste of the meat.
A scholar on a group that recently arrived in France described meeting diplomats in the desert.
“Suddenly, a refrigerator appears from nowhere and you see everything that has been deprived of for months,” he told Reuters. “I ate it, but my chest is painful, making the people we left behind.”
Reuters' speeches from several Palestinians refused to be determined because of concerns about retribution from Hamas and other armed groups.
Several diplomats said travel documents posed logistical challenges. Some papers were lost in the war, while others were children born since their inception. They said some people must have travel documents issued by Palestinian authorities in Ramallah or Cairo.
According to diplomats, flight data and Israel’s interior ministry, it started in Jordan, although some Israeli flights were flying to the countries that helped them leave.
For Ayoub, the painful memory is significant.
At the beginning of the war, one of Ayoub's sisters, her husband and their son, was killed in the bombing, triggered by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, with about 1,200 people killed and 251 killed, deemed Gaza.
Ayoub's nephew is an architect who recently won a scholarship in France but never received it. He died Thursday after being injured in an air strike. The French program that supported the fellowship issued a statement mourning his death.
Ayoub was ambivalent about leaving: relieved, ensuring a better future for his children, but at the same time irritated.
“I'm so happy that next I remember what's going on in Gaza,” Ayub said.
(Written by Maayan Lubell and Alexander Cornwell; Mustafa Abu Ganeyh, James Mackenzie, James Mackenzie, Nuha Sharaf and Emily Rose in Padraic Halpin, Stephanie van den Berg, Amsterdam in Amsterdam; Joanna Plucińska and William James in London, Amerto and Amante, Amsterdam;
