Palestinians inspect the damage of destroyed buildings caused by the ongoing Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City, Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023.Abed Khaled/The Associated Press
Palestinian Canadians with relatives stuck in Gaza are more anxious than ever after communications networks were cut off amid Israel’s bombardment as the country’s offensive intensified.
Rana Bader’s husband, Eyhav Bader, was in Gaza City taking care of his father, who recently had a stroke, when the conflict broke out. Ms. Bader, who lives in London, Ont., and has several relatives in Gaza, last spoke with her husband early Friday morning, before the blackout.
Since then, no news. “Not him, not my parents, not my siblings, no one,” she said in a phone interview Saturday.
Grass burning along the border with Gaza near Sderot, Israel on Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023.SERGEY PONOMAREV/The New York Times News Service
Ms. Bader said both she and her husband have tried to get help from Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to pull him out, to no avail. “I don’t think there’s any plan to get Canadians out of this conflict area,” she said.
In a statement early Friday morning, Department of Global Affairs spokesperson Pierre Cuguen said the government is assisting 437 Canadians, permanent residents and family members in Gaza. GAC is working “around the clock to secure a window for Canadians to exit Gaza,” possibly at the Rafah border crossing to Egypt, he said.
In the meantime, Ms. Bader’s three daughters, aged 16, 10 and 8, are “praying the whole day that they can have their dad come back safe and sound.” They are also grieving their uncle, Ms. Bader’s brother, who was killed in an Israeli strike on their parents’ home on Oct. 8, she said.
People mourn as they collect the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli air raids on October 28, 2023 in Khan Yunis, Gaza.Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
Israel has blockaded and bombarded Gaza for three weeks after Islamist group Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis in the deadliest day of the country’s 75-year history.
The Palestinian death toll in the territory on Saturday rose to just over 7,600 people, with 377 deaths reported since late Friday, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. A majority of those killed have been women and minors, the ministry said.
A doctor by training, Ms. Bader’s husband is trying to help and treat the many injured at a Gaza hospital, but conditions are increasingly difficult, she said. Basic medical supplies like syringes and gauze are missing, food is scarce, and the little water available is foul.
“He told me that everything looks so horrible,” Ms. Bader said.
Mervat Bakeer, who was born and raised in Gaza and is now a family doctor in London, Ont., said her whole family, brothers, sisters, cousins and aunts, her father and stepmother, are scattered all over the strip.
The last message she got came around 11:15 a.m. Friday from one of her brothers in Rafah. “They were expressing the extreme fear and devastation” they experienced the previous night, she said in a phone interview Saturday. “They said it was the worst since the beginning of the attack on Gaza. They were terrified.”
Rabbi Dovid Feldman speaks at a Pro-Palestine protest in in Ottawa, Sunday, Oct. 22, 2023.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Dr. Bakeer said relatives fled their homes in previous days as their neighbourhood was bombed, but that they again endured heavy bombings around them in Rafah, shattering their accommodation’s windows. “There is no place to go, and no safe place,” she said.
Reem Sultan, also from London, Ont., has many relatives in Gaza but has not been able to communicate with any of them since Friday around noon, leaving her to imagine what they’re enduring.
“All that’s going through my head is the sheer destruction that’s happening,” she said in a phone interview Saturday.
Ms. Sultan said in her last conversation on Friday, she connected with an aunt whom she had not heard from for weeks. “She was crying, she is in her 80s, she said ‘They destroyed my home, I have no place to go to,’ ” she recalled.
“And I said, ‘It’s OK auntie, as long as you’re safe, it’s all that matters.’”
With a report from The Associated Press