 | | Foreign passport holders at the Rafah border checking a list to see if they were permitted to leave the Gaza Strip.Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times |
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Evacuees from Gaza arrive in Egypt |
Dozens of people left Gaza and entered Egypt today, the first such exits since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel. They included people with foreign or dual nationalities and seriously injured Palestinians and their families. |
By late in the day, buses had ferried 361 foreign nationals over the border to Egypt, and ambulances had carried 45 severely injured Palestinians, along with some of their family members, to Egyptian hospitals, the Egyptian state-owned television channel Al Qahera reported. |
Ramona Okumura, a Seattle resident who is a volunteer for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, confirmed in a text message that she was able to cross from Gaza into Egypt at the Rafah border crossing. "Just finished. In Egypt now. Free!" she said. |
Thousands of foreigners, aid workers and critically wounded Palestinians are expected to leave Gaza in the coming days under an agreement negotiated by Israel, Egypt, Hamas, the U.S. and Qatar. |
But some two million increasingly desperate residents of Gaza remain trapped . Most phone and internet service in Gaza was cut off late Tuesday and into Wednesday. |
While a few U.S. citizens were among the aid workers let out of the enclave, diplomats said that most Americans in Gaza — the State Department estimates there are 500 to 600 — would not begin to leave until tomorrow. U.S. officials have accused Hamas of preventing Americans from leaving. |
The list of people set to leave includes foreign citizens and dual passport holders from Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Indonesia, Japan and Jordan, as well as staff members from aid organizations including Doctors Without Borders, the International Committee of the Red Cross and UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians. Officials at the U.N. agency emphasized that it would send new staff members to replace the departing workers. |
— Reporting by Vivian Lee, Hiba Yazbek, Victoria Kim and Emma Bubola |
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