Getting out of Gaza is hard, but staying can be even harder

GAZA CITY — The crumbling white arches of the Yasser Arafat International Airport stand like Roman ruins, surrounded by sand, rubble and scrub brush.

For two short years, between 1998 and 2000, Gazans were able to fly from here directly to places like Cairo, Cyprus and Istanbul. Conceived in 1995 as part of the Oslo II Accord, the airport was completed in 1997 with $60 million in grants from Egypt, Morocco, and European countries. Many Palestinians saw the freedom of movement it brought as a concrete step toward self-determination and statehood.

But just two years after the airport opened, the Israeli military destroyed its runway and bombed its radio tower. It’s been closed ever since.

The only way out for Gazans now — unless they can obtain special permission to travel through Israel — is the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt.

A cafe at the Rafah border crossing is like a scene from the 1942 film "Casablanca": Would-be travelers wait here to learn if they can cross into Sinai, and from there to the outside world. For most, it’s not their first time at the crossing — or their second, or even their third. The average customer spends many more hours than they’d like lingering over water pipes and dipping dry biscuits into hot sweet tea.

With few opportunities for work and education in the Gaza Strip, there's always been a steady stream of young people trying to leave. Since Israel’s offensive this summer, however, the desire to get out has only grown, the UN relief agency says.

Even in a place that's seen three wars in six years, the violence of July and August was unprecedented: well over 2,000 Palestinians were killed, a quarter of them children, and the small territory was buried under 4 million tons of rubble.

Travel abroad is almost a necessity for many young Gazans to get ahead. According to a 2011 UN report, 66 percent of people between the ages of 20 and 26 are unemployed. Opportunities for higher education are limited.

Doa’a Al-Mobayed, 19, a second year medical sciences student at the Islamic University, hopes to pursue a Masters degree or PhD after college. “But my field doesn’t exist in Gaza so I’ll have to go to another country,” she says.

But getting out now isn't easy. To leave the Strip Gazans must get permission from either the Israeli or the Egyptian government, which is prohibitively hard to come by these days.

On the Israeli side it’s because of severe, often arbitrary, restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement, which were tightened even further for Gazans after the Islamist group Hamas took over the Strip in 2007. In Egypt, since the ouster last summer of the Muslim Brotherhood government — which maintained good relations with its sister organization in Gaza, Hamas — the new authorities have placed much tighter controls on Palestinians coming in.

Aside from the restrictions at the border and complicated logistics, getting out of the Strip is expensive.

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Yousef Salah al-Zain, 26, finished college in Gaza in June with plans to go abroad for work experience. His family in the United Arab Emirates had sent him a visa to leave but the Egyptian authorities denied him entry twice, without explanation. Then the summer’s offensive began, and hardly anyone was let in or out. A few weeks later, during the height of the fighting, his visa expired. A new one, good for only another few months, cost him around $540. In 2011, GDP per capita in Gaza was $1,165.

While he waited to leave, his neighbors’ house was destroyed with six people inside it. Now he waits every day at the Rafah border crossing, hoping to be allowed out. Since the offensive, al-Zain says, “I wake up in the morning and I don’t know if I’ll be alive the next day or not; there’s no future.”

Razan Hassouna, a 20-year-old artist, says, “anyone who gets out of Gaza is someone who succeeds, even if you fail outside. Travel is so hard for us, those who leave are so lucky.”

Women, who already contend with a local preference for hiring men in some fields, often face extra travel limits. Some families are unwilling to let their daughters go abroad by themselves to study. “My family will not accept the idea,” says Lojain al-Aklouk, 18, a student in the English teaching faculty at al-Aqsa University.

25-year-old Rabah al-Massry is a computer engineer who graduated first in his college class. Despite that, after school he faced a “cycle of unemployment” in which the only jobs available were contracts of a few months at a time with the government or the UN relief agency. Despairing of finding stable work, al-Massry and his brother opened a computer repair shop. Two months later the offensive started and the shop was bombed. It feels like the “whole world is closed in your face,” he says.

Desperate, he considered leaving through illegal tunnels to get to Egypt, and then to Europe by boat from Libya. It’s a very dangerous journey. On Sept.14 a boat bound for Europe sank and around 500 people drowned, many of them believed to be Palestinians.

But then he found out that his wife, a fellow engineer, was pregnant. He doesn’t want to risk his child growing up without a father. “If I don’t find an opportunity to leave Gaza I won’t try to have any other children,” he says.

“I couldn’t provide myself or my wife or my family with any security in the last war. We all fled. We all left our houses.”

For some, the destruction of the summer’s war sparked a feeling of patriotism and a desire to rebuild. “Everyone thinks about leaving but it should be the opposite … they should think about developing the country,” says Doha Shaab, an 18-year-old engineering student.

“The war made me look to the future even more,” she says defiantly. “We are used to war. I’m not thinking about immigration.”

Insam, 21, who studies biology and declined to give her full name, agrees: “The state needs us. It can’t benefit from us if we leave it.”

She says that sense of solidarity after the war includes stronger support for the violent tactics of Hamas’ armed wing, the al-Qasam Brigades. “The Palestinian people and the [al-Qasam Brigades] resistance are like the moon and stars in darkness,” she says.

“They do something for the state. They defend our country and our honor,” says Mohamed Selmy, 17. Selmy says he’s been considering joining the armed resistance since this summer’s violence.

“I want to defend my country,” he says.