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“Imagine calling your parents, brothers and sisters and just wanting to know that they are still alive,” recalls Dr. Salim Ghayyda, tearful as he struggles to get his family out of the “inhumane” situation in Gaza.
Ghayyda, 51, worries daily about the fate of his elderly parents, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews, as they endure grim conditions in an improvised refugee camp in the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, near the Egyptian border.
The British-Palestinian, who has lived and worked in the UK for 21 years, has now launched an online fundraising campaign and is lobbying politicians for his family to stay safe at the border.
Ghayyda, who is a pediatric consultant at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, said that 31 members of his family are surviving without running water and with little food, while raw sewage runs through the streets and they huddle in tents to keep warm.
He said: “It is the most inhuman and dangerous situation a human being can find themselves in. All of my family’s homes are in northern Gaza. So they all had to evacuate due to the bombing and some of them were displaced and uprooted two or even three times.
“Then they all ended up in Rafah, which, as you know, is a small town near the Egyptian border. And their living conditions are really incomprehensible.
“Rafah itself gets very cold at night because it’s almost a desert area, near the Sinai. It is very cold at night. There is no running water, so the water is collected in buckets.”
He added: “The food was grown in Gaza, such as fruits and vegetables, but the conditions are very dangerous, so the farmers cannot really cultivate the land. Even when my family finds food, this is the worst quality ever.
“They told me that they would never imagine buying the food they are buying right now, but there is no other alternative.”
Israel began its military campaign after Hamas’ deadly incursion on October 7th. Since then, Israel has launched a fierce bombing campaign that has killed more than 25,000 people, mostly women and children.
Just last week, UN judges said that Israel must ensure that its forces do not commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Dr. Ghayyda’s family has no British citizenship, so they are not allowed to cross Rafah to Egypt, so his 80-year-old father Nabil and 70-year-old mother Dalal are trapped along with other members of his family.
He said: “There were agonizing blackout periods when, suddenly, Israel cut off communication for a day or two or recently even a week.
“I would find myself in such a state that someone asks me how I feel and it’s as if someone had broken my heart 100 times.
“Of course I am worried about them all the time and every day, every hour, I check on them “are you still alive … are you still alive?”, I couldn’t sleep for weeks and weeks.”
He is desperate to get his family out of the region and wants more government support in assisting British citizens who have relatives stranded in Gaza.
Dr. Ghayyda points to refugee schemes for Syrians and Ukrainians fleeing conflict, but questions why there has been no similar effort to resettle Palestinians from Gaza.
He said: “For some reason our families don’t matter to the British government, almost as if we were ghosts, we are not seen.”
Dr. Ghayyda, who was born in Gaza, said another difficult part of the conflict was seeing the hospitals where he trained and worked as a young man now being bombed, while his colleagues struggle to treat people.
He added: “I am tortured trying to drive them out of their native lands, but I cannot accept the fate that if they stay, they will be killed, if not by bombs, at least by hunger or disease.
“There is not a day when I do not call them when someone is not ill …. my father almost died twice for lack of medical care.”
Dr. Ghayyda has worked and lived in Scotland for the past 11 years, with his wife and three children. Arriving in the UK in 2003, he previously worked in hospitals in England.
He launched a fundraising appeal on GoFundMe to raise £ 100,000 to help his family cross the border safely to Egypt. So far, a little over £ 15,000 has been pledged.