Gaza Dispatches: Meet Walaa Zeitar

Since fighting began on October 7, more than 250 aid workers have been killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, according to the UN. Remaining aid workers in Gaza work in the most dangerous conditions in the world to deliver basic services to people living through the war. In June 2024, Refugees International spoke with Palestinians from Gaza who had been displaced to Egypt. This is the story of Walaa Zeitar — a Palestinian aid worker and mother.

“On October 7, I was preparing my kids to go to school and preparing myself for a trip to Madrid, Spain, for a workshop. Suddenly, everything just turned upside down.

We had very, very, very tough moments while we were in our house during those first two months…They destroyed most of the surrounding area, and our house was severely damaged.

I continued to work as an emergency responder and then head of an international organization from my house managing aid distribution during the first two months.

Even after the house was damaged in the attack, I cleaned it, and we stayed in the undamaged area before they [Israeli forces] asked us to evacuate.

We continued into Rafah with my family, where I worked as a mother and a humanitarian aid worker.

Every night, I stared at the ceiling, desperately trying to calm my thoughts and reassure myself that it wouldn’t fall and bury my children.

“During our displacement in Rafah, we were inside our organization’s safe house with around 70 people. 

So we were suffering from contagious skin allergies, including lice. Everyone was affected… So it was, for me, as a woman, a massive workload I was handling in addition to my job. I was working around 12 hours a day, not just in my regular job as an emergency responder, but also as a mother. I woke up very early in the morning, if I even managed to sleep, to clean the lice from my kids’ hair and my own, and to wash clothes by hand.

We started to notice a lack of basic items like flour and bread. This was the scariest experience for me. We were trying so hard to find food, and I felt grateful that I had the money to buy a pack of flour, even though the prices had multiplied by ten. I didn’t care about the cost—I just wanted to feed my children.

We saw many people desperately seeking even a single piece of bread where we were living. There were moments when we had no flour at all, even when we had the money to buy it.

I was eating almost half a meal or just one meal per day, relying more on drinking water. I didn’t have much of an appetite back then, but it was also a coping strategy to conserve food for the kids. One of the most horrible things was the constant fear that I couldn’t adequately feed my children.

“The psychological panic was overwhelming—I wasn’t ready to die, and I wasn’t ready to bury my children.

I spent an entire night awake until the sunlight rose again the next day. Eventually, I decided I could no longer stay inside Gaza.

Despite knowing that leaving would mean sacrificing my job, my priority was to save my children. By the end of December, we found a way and managed to leave Gaza… It cost us a significant amount of money—$9,000.

I think it’s crucial to shed light on this group of Palestinians who left Gaza. I keep telling people that this, for me, is another form of displacement. It’s a massive displacement because people have been escaping death. These individuals at least had some money to pay to leave, but when they arrived here, they faced the challenge of restarting their lives. Whether through work opportunities or business ventures, they now struggle with many legal issues to do so.