Gazan Refugees in Egypt Are in a Hellish Limbo
Over the last 15 months, more than 100,000 Palestinians have escaped to Egypt. They pay thousands of dollars a head to escape the Gaza Strip — but upon reaching Cairo face a future without jobs, rights, or even the ability to leave.
Qasr al-Aini Hospital in Cairo, photographed on January 4, 2025. (Carolina S. Pedrazzi)
It was a cold morning in November 2023 when Rawan Abu Safiya found herself sitting alone in her sister’s guest room, displaced in northern Gaza. Suddenly, the shelling of a tank obliterated the space she was in. When she regained consciousness, she couldn’t see out of her right eye, as shrapnel had pierced its way through her face. The skin on all her limbs had melted from third-degree burns.
Months later, after relocating from hospital to hospital inside the strip — from Al-Awda in Jabalia to Al-Shifa in Rimal, both medical facilities later damaged or destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — her health was barely recovering. Rawan could hardly believe it when her name, which her father had registered on an evacuation application weeks before, was selected for medical treatment outside Gaza. For dozens of miles, she and her elderly mother trekked to reach Rafah, counting their blessings as they believed they were escaping hell. However, instead of being sent to Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, where other Gazan patients had been evacuated, they were relocated to Egypt. There they found themselves in a painstaking limbo, denied most rights ever since arriving in March 2024.
Rawan Abu Safiya is a relative of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital who was abducted by the IDF last month along with other staff and patients. A photograph of him walking amid the rubble toward Israeli tanks sparked emergency appeals for his rescue worldwide. His condition remains unknown. The Abu Safiyas, like most Gazan families, have met a tragic fate. Those stranded in Egypt have had little opportunity to voice their hardship.
Palestinians in Egypt — who the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) embassy estimated numbered around 100,000 as of last summer — are stuck in an existential limbo. They are banned from employment, students are unable to attend schools, and they suffer from dire financial strain. Accessing banking and health care is fraught with obstacles. The main issue stems from the impossibility of obtaining residency permits, which foreigners in Egypt need in order to work legally. Gazans are granted only a thirty-five-day tourist visa. Since they can neither return home nor leave, they remain trapped in a legal deadlock, which the Egyptian government has left unaddressed.
As of January 2025, the security clearance check for any Palestinian citizen (impossible from Gaza, given the closure of Rafah) wishing to enter Egypt, even for simple tourism, costs around $1,000 per person, discouraging travel. Meanwhile, Israeli tourists pay only a standard $25 fee, similar to what most Western travelers are charged.
Palestinian refugees are not protected by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); instead, they are aided by the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which has no official mandate in Egypt. This leaves them without meaningful international support. In contrast, Syrian and Sudanese refugees in Egypt have been able to integrate more effectively, facing fewer residency obstacles and benefiting from UNHCR backing.
The gap in international protection leaves Palestinians feeling abandoned: “There are no systems supporting us,” said Nataleen Yasser from Gaza, twenty-three, in a Cairo café. “We only have ourselves.”
Shared Traumas
In early January 2025, Jacobin met with several Gazan families forcibly displaced and evacuated to Egypt. Bonding over the shared trauma of experiencing an ongoing genocide, while fearing for their loved ones still at risk of death or already under the rubble, they share the agony and frustration of being unable to legally integrate into this new country — a gateway out of hell but also a sentence to stagnation.
Rawan and her mother joined me for coffee on a warm January morning in New Damietta, a town located on the Mediterranean coast three hours northeast of Cairo. In one of Damietta governorate’s main hospitals, dozens of Gazan medical evacuees were relocated during the war. Upon arrival, they received medical treatment and hoped to rebuild their lives. However, Rawan and her mother have been forbidden from leaving the hospital premises. Their little escape was itself a risk, but they wanted to share their story and meet someone coming all the way from Cairo to listen to them.
“We felt like prisoners of the hospital,” Rawan said, though she acknowledged the kindness of the nurses and medical staff. She is being treated with laser ministrations to heal the scars on her body from burns from shelling, but her eyesight is still lost. Reminiscing about times before the war when things were still hard, but simpler, Rawan and her mother feel abandoned. “The PA came to visit us once during the summer, gave us $100, and never showed up again,” they explain. “We are still relying on that contribution for expenses.” Not allowed to leave the hospital, and forbidden from working, Gazan patients in Egyptian hospitals — which provide room and board to them and one immediate family member who evacuated with them — have no source of income.
Similarly, Nataleen Yasser, an English-language translation graduate from Gaza who evacuated with her sick mother from Rafah to Cairo in March 2024, told me: “When we first arrived at Qasr al-Aini Hospital, our passports and cell phones were taken away. We were told we could not leave or connect to the internet.” To get there, they drove across the Sinai for over eighteen hours crammed with ten other people in an ambulance. The journey out of the strip forced Nataleen to “embrace the idea of living again. [Before evacuating] I accepted the truth that I, too, would die.” Starting life over again in Egypt has been difficult, as her numbness is reinforced by the sense of abandonment by both the PA and the Egyptian Red Crescent.
During Ramadan, a month after she was admitted to Qasr al-Aini where she “felt like a prisoner,” Nataleen sneaked out of the hospital to visit Nasr City. Her heart pounded as she smelled the fresh — though polluted — air of Cairo for the first time in weeks.
Nasr City, a neighborhood in East Cairo, hosts the headquarters of Hala Travel Agency, a branch of the Organi Group that oversees all transactions, evacuations, and entries across the Rafah Crossing. Until the IDF invaded it in May 2024, Rafah was the only evacuation route for Gazans who could afford it. Nataleen had gone there to register her sixteen-year-old brother on an evacuation list, hoping to reunite him with her and her mother in Cairo. For each evacuation, Hala Travel Agency charged at least $5,000 — a 900 percent increase from prewar times, when Gazans paid no more than $500 to leave the strip. “For my mother’s evacuation, we had to sell our car,” Nataleen said. “Most Gazans sold everything they owned to get out, and once they arrived in Egypt, they were left with nothing.”
“VIP Travel Services”
Organi Group brands itself as the “mother company of a group of leading companies in various fields.” The group, founded in 2010 by Ibrahim al-Organi — a Sinai tribal leader, magnate, and close associate of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — oversees various sectors, including construction, hospitality, security, and travel. Hala Travel Agency, established in 2021 to provide “VIP travel services” from Gaza to Egypt through Rafah, has reportedly charged Gazans up to $10,000 per evacuation. Working with travel agencies inside Gaza, Hala coordinated security clearances, visas, transportation, and other logistics for Palestinians fortunate enough to leave the strip.
After the IDF’s invasion of the Rafah Crossing, Organi maintained his authority and profit over everything entering and exiting Gaza but no longer coordinated evacuations. Gazans have been trapped without recourse since. Middle East Eye reported that as of last April, the group earned at least $2 million daily from evacuation services. This figure does not include profits from the hundreds of commercial and aid trucks stuck in Rafah. These trucks, eventually forbidden to enter by Israel, still have to pay fees to Organi’s company Abnaa Sinai (Sons of Sinai) to remain on its roads.
Hala Travel Agency no longer appears on the Organi Group website; its last archived presence, found via the Wayback Machine, dates to August 2024. The topic remains highly taboo in Egypt, and those investigating it are warned to tread carefully. “This company is run by a gang, not a governmental entity. It operates without legal oversight or judicial accountability,” a source revealed.
NGO Aid
Nevertheless, when help from above was missing, grassroots organizations mobilized to support Palestinian refugees. In particular, two NGOs emerged in the last fifteen months of war thanks to the individual efforts of young Arab Muslim women: Amal Awani of Sanad Palestine, and Israa Ali of Ahfad al Zaytoun.
Amal had left Gaza to Cairo on a business trip just a few weeks before October 7, 2023. Subsequently, she was stranded in Egypt while her entire family and fiancé were still in the north of the strip. She realized early on that survival in Cairo would bring new and unexpected struggles. “At the end of the month, we sit and think about how to pay rent,” she said. “We deprive ourselves of many things just to make ends meet.” Real estate agents raised prices as soon as they heard her Palestinian dialect, but Amal was able to channel her frustration into action. With a background in social work and event organization, she launched Sanad (“support, in Arabic) to assist Palestinians in Cairo who were escaping Gaza.
What began as a modest effort focusing on women quickly expanded into a network providing help for children, the injured, and displaced families. Donations, free meals, clothing distribution, and recreational days were just some of the initiatives she single-handedly organized. “I announced on my personal page that I was starting an initiative called Sanad,” Amal explained. “I wanted to support Palestinians in Cairo. I organized focus group sessions with Palestinian women to hear about the challenges they were facing and figure out how I could help.” Now hundreds depend on Sanad, which has become a lifeline for those exiled from their homeland and represents a psychosocial support center for the scattered Palestinian community in Cairo.
Israa, a Canadian Egyptian national, felt a calling to move back to her ancestral homeland after the genocide in Gaza started and was shocked by the lack of awareness and sensitivity in the West toward the Palestinian cause. When she initially arrived in Cairo, she had no plan, until she was put in touch with a Gazan family who needed assistance. Thanks to crowdfunding on social media, Israa managed to rent a space in Nasr City that virtually became a school. Palestinian children in Egypt have been denied the right to education because of their lack of resident status, meaning they cannot be enrolled in public schools. Those who have access to computers, or internet through their phones, attend online classes taught by PA teachers remotely from Ramallah. However, as Israa explained, “having a community and a space where they feel cared for, is fundamental.” After nearly a year of organizing events, educational activities, and more, she observes that their trauma is only surfacing now, because they no longer feel in survival mode. “When you have calmed down and have the simple luxury of a schedule, that’s when the PTSD symptoms show up.”
Ahfad al Zaytoun, which means “grandchildren of the olive trees” in Arabic, is an example of how the Egyptian population came together to fill the gaps that institutional support left open. Israa couldn’t believe it when overnight she received over two thousand applications from volunteers who simply wanted to help out. “It’s as if we created an outlet for the Egyptian people who wanted to help, because there is nothing institutionally provided to make them feel like they are helping Gaza.”
Cease-Fire Hope
When news came on Wednesday, January 15, that Hamas and Israel had reached a cease-fire agreement, Gazans in exile could not believe their eyes. The deal, brokered in Doha through the efforts of Qatari, Egyptian, and American diplomats, promises Gazans an initial seven-week period during which Israeli forces will withdraw from the strip, humanitarian aid will surge, and prisoners will be released.
Reports suggest that Egypt is preparing to reopen Rafah once the cease-fire begins, allowing tens of thousands of tons of food to finally make it to the famished Gazan population. Medical patients will also be allowed to evacuate. It remains unclear whether Palestinians stuck outside the strip will be able to return.
Nataleen, whose family had already rebuilt their home in 2021 after Israeli air strikes destroyed it, said, “We will go back and sit on the rubble, piecing back our homes brick by brick.” Many Palestinians have mixed emotions about the cease-fire, lingering between hope and fear.
“We really wanted to be there [in Gaza] and feel this with our people,” said Shaaban and Jumana A’alwan, young parents who evacuated the strip with their toddler over eight months ago. “And [we want to] be able to also go back to the north to our homes.”
Plans to go back home are met with the realization that resuming life in Gaza will be arduous, particularly for patients who require medical care. “There is no life [in Gaza],” said Rawan, “and going back there means reviving memories of trauma.”
But at least, for some, it would help with the sense of guilt of having escaped hell while leaving behind their loved ones. “If we survive until [the cease-fire],” said Nataleen, “I’ll soon be able to hug my family.”