834: Yousef and the Fourth Move

Ira Glass

Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, Yousef Hammash has been a master of good timing and good luck. We did a story about him a few months ago. Let me remind you for a minute who he is and how capably he got his family from place to place.

Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Yousef fled his home on October 8 because he was afraid that Jabalia, where he was from, was going to be bombed. And the next day, October 9, Jabalia was bombed. As the war moved, he moved a second time, down south, to a city called Khan Younis. Then Israel dropped leaflets from the sky telling everybody to evacuate Khan Younis immediately and get to safety further south in Rafah.

Yousef packed up the car that day, his wife Manal, his kids, his mom, and made his third move. And this is around the time that he started having conversations with one of our producers here, Chana Joffe-Walt. He told Chana that he knew his sisters, who were in Khan Younis, needed also to go to Rafah. And he kept wheedling, arguing, pleading, making promises, wearing them down.

And they still did not move until an airstrike hit the building next to them. Terrifying, right? Yousef raced to where they were, and as soon as they saw each other, Yousef and his sister shared their relief by being exactly how they always are with each other.

Ira Glass

Finally, he took his sisters to safety in Rafah in a tent camp that he built for them. This was back in December. Over time, Yousef's tent camp of extended family in Rafah grew to 60 people, with Yousef managing it as mayor, repairman, caterer, driver, health care provider.

And then, on the same day Yousef's sister Aseel had a baby, bringing the population of the tent camp to 61, the prime minister of Israel announced he was planning to evacuate Rafah and invade the city where Yousef's family and over a million other Palestinians were living.

Yousef was facing moving everybody for a fourth time. And he's always been the one who's made this call for his family. Yousef's the one who decides. It's too dangerous to stay where we are. And this is when we have to go. It has to be now. And this is where we're going next. But this time, Yousef didn't know where to go next to keep everybody safe and together. They got as far south as you can go in Gaza. There really might not be another place to run to. He told Chana back then--

Ira Glass

But there was one other option. It was just one that Yousef had never seriously considered. They could try to leave Gaza, which might seem like an obvious choice that anybody would want to do-- flee the place where bombs are falling, and it's getting harder and harder to find food and drinkable water. But it's not an obvious choice for Yousef and for lots of people, as you'll hear.

Today, what happens when Yousef gets pressed into a fourth move, one that he has deeply mixed feelings about and is not even sure he can pull off. And that's to try to get his family out as quickly as possible before Israel invades the city where they're living. Time, he knew, was not on his side.

And if you think you can imagine what that entails, let me tell you, you really do not know the half of it. You're about to witness feats of ingenuity, strokes of luck, and big piles of cash on a deadline against enormous odds. And also, you'll see how hard it is on this family to make this decision, how even trying to go tears them up, tears Yousef up. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And with that, I'll turn things over to Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Yousef did not want to leave Gaza, where he's from, a place where he knows everyone, knows every system, has connections everywhere. His job is doing humanitarian work in Gaza for Gazans, and his entire family is in Gaza. A core part of Yousef's identity is that he takes care of the family. So Yousef had no plan to leave, did not even want to think about leaving Gaza. And then, one day in February, he found out he might leave Gaza. He was in the car with his wife, Manal, and their kids.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Yousef did not realize that a conversation had started among the women in his family that wasn't so much happening behind his back as just away from him, in the places he wasn't.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Manal says Yousef had told her and his mother he didn't want to leave. But if they ever wanted to leave Gaza, he would make it happen. And Manal and his mom said no. Their whole family's in Gaza.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And Manal knew, like everyone thinking about leaving Gaza knows, if she left, there was a good possibility she'd never come back. So, no. She said she didn't want to leave, and she meant it. But then Manal thought, maybe? The idea stuck to her.

She thought of it when her children screamed through bombing or when they begged for chicken, instead of more canned food, when she noticed Illya had forgotten all of her alphabet. And she thought of it when she spent the entire day looking for wood to boil water so her kids could drink.

She worried. What if they ran out of time? What if the Israelis showed up before Yousef had another plan? Then Manal mentioned all of this to one of Yousef's sisters, Aseel. Aseel is the sister who is most like Yousef-- decisive, a problem-solver, a planner.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The process of considering leaving Gaza in this war is not just one of weighing options, one item after another. It's also getting people's blessings. It's a series of permissions. There was Aseel-- gave her blessing. Eventually, the other sisters did, too, knowing that they were not going to go, couldn't go. They had their own extended families and lives in Gaza.

Yousef's mom, after some persuading, agreed to go with Manal and Yousef and the kids. So it was decided. Manal told her kids they were going. And for her, that was the happiest moment, the relief of being able to say to her kids, this will end for you. They were excited, so excited that Illya, the five-year-old, ended up breaking the news to her dad in the car before Manal even had a chance to tell him.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This was March. Israel continued to say, our plan is to invade Rafah. Yousef knew, if they did invade, they might close the border. There was limited time to act. He agreed it was the right choice for his children.

And yet, everything about how this move was happening was different, slower than I'd seen Yousef act through the entire war-- not that he was stalling. He'd made some calls. He was going through the steps. But old Yousef would have made 1,000 calls, checking all the angles, calling in favors, urgently reading everything available about what Israel might do next and when. And now, this Yousef did not sound like a person who knows there may only be a small window to make your next move. And it's easy to be too late.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Yousef couldn't talk about the process, how they'd get out on the record. He worried, justifiably, that any public statement could jeopardize their chances of getting out. What he could say was that he had paid to register his family to leave, and that at some point, his family's names would appear on a list of people allowed to cross the Rafah border. But when that would happen-- unclear.

Another week passed, then another. Those blessings Manal had collected from everyone in the family, they meant it, but the longer this wait went on, the blessings got a little worn. Yousef started seeing it when he checked in on his sisters.

Chana Joffe-Walt

He was not doing his job keeping them safe and together. But while he waited, Yousef really did try on the safety front. He threw himself in to making sure his sisters would be OK without him there. He lined up a million backups-- a guy with a car in case they needed to leave quickly, a guy to help with broken phones, with internet problems.

He told friends, I'm going to be calling on you. You need to look out for my sisters. He set up a contact at a currency shop so he could send money from Egypt. And he stashed emergency cash with several different people he trusted.

Chana Joffe-Walt

President Biden was warning Israel not to invade Rafah. 26 EU countries issued a statement saying an invasion of Rafah would be catastrophic. Yousef continued to wait. There continued to be bombings, drones, gunfire all the time, but also something new that Yousef noticed happening around him in Rafah and at the family's tent camp-- a slow motion collapse.

Every day, Yousef would notice a new deterioration of just daily life. There was no trash pickup, no police or services, nobody regulating traffic or businesses. There was no governance. One day, he'd get a call that someone's mother-in-law used the shower when it wasn't her family's day. And by the time Yousef arrived, the conflict had exploded for another day.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The more of this Yousef saw, the more he settled in to the decision to go.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Seven weeks after Israel announced plans to invade Rafah, Yousef and Manal were still waiting. Every night, they would check a Telegram channel called the Land Port Rafah Crossing.

Around 10:00 PM, it would post screenshots of a printed list of names. You'd have to zoom in on the photo, and if your name was on that list, you knew to show up at the Rafah crossing the next day. You had been granted permission to cross. 300, sometimes 400, people a day.

Yousef and Manal's names were never listed. But Yousef started seeing the names of people he knew had registered not long before him showing up on the list. By the end of March, he told me, it must be close.

Chana Joffe-Walt

What is this? This wait to be placed on a list, what is this? And you have to pay to get on the list? Why? There were, at the time, over a million people living in a city that was about to be invaded. There was one way out of Gaza. I wanted to understand what was this opaque process that Yousef was waiting on and could barely talk about.

Ira Glass

Chana Joffe-Walt. Coming up, the actual price to get somebody out of Gaza. And yes, they're going to want that in cash. No wire transfer, no credit card, no mobile payment. Good, old-fashioned cash only. That's in a minute, on Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, we're returning to Yousef Hammash and his family in Rafah, who've been caught up in this war that began October 7 when Hamas crossed into Israel, killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, and took over 240 hostages, and has dragged on for nearly nine months now, over 37,000 Palestinians and over 1,500 Israelis dead and people like Yousef and his sisters trapped in the middle of the fighting.

And back in February, when Yousef decided to try to leave Gaza, leave all this behind, it was hard getting everybody on board, handing off responsibilities. But also it was just literally hard to leave. It was hard to get out.

Yousef was cautious when it came to talking about this part of the process, so Chana started asking around. How exactly does it work? How did a person get out of Gaza with the clock ticking? Everybody wondering when and if Israel was really going to do what it had announced it was going to do and actually invade Rafah. What procedure do you go through? Who do you call? What form do you fill out to leave Gaza? Here's Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

You know it's not a clean, defensible operation when nobody who touches it will talk about it. I spoke with Palestinians who went through the Rafah crossing, or were trying to, people who've reported on the system, people who work inside it. Almost everybody didn't want to talk publicly. They all worried about pissing off the wrong people in the Egyptian military and intelligence.

The first detailed document I read about how the Rafah crossing works was an investigation by a group of reporters at a site called the Organized Crime, Corruption, and Reporting Project. And even they, the people who authored the report, did not want to be named.

Chana Joffe-Walt

There were several reporters working inside and outside Gaza. I'm going to call this one Naya. Naya explained, after October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, officially, Palestinians in Gaza with no other passport were not allowed to leave through the Rafah border. Israel closed every other exit point.

But pretty soon, these ads started popping up online, offering to get people out. They were for brokers, people calling themselves travel agents or travel coordinators. Naya pulled up a couple of the ads while we were talking-- travel in luxury, your dignity and pride intact.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Every war has its own manic economy. These travel coordinators were sometimes charging $2,500 per person, sometimes $5,000. It depended who you asked and when. You could send the money from your phone or hand it to a coordinator in Gaza. As best Naya and the other OCCRP reporters could find out, a lot of the money seemed to go to Egyptian intelligence, although Egypt has publicly denied this.

And the price rose over time. A few months after the war started, we called one of the brokers ourselves and asked what exactly is the price now. And he said, sometimes it's $7,000, $10,000, or $12,000-- $12,000 per person, an astounding number. Before the war started, the average person in Gaza made $3,700 a year. It was very difficult for Palestinians trying to leave to tell who was legit or to price shop. People gave their money to brokers who disappeared. It was the Wild West.

And then, the entire system changed. Egypt controls the Rafah crossing. Here are some things Egypt did not want. Egypt did not want Israel pushing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt. It didn't want a refugee crisis. It didn't want Hamas getting a foothold in Egypt. Egypt also didn't want to look like it was supporting the displacement of Palestinians by facilitating their exit out of Gaza. And last, Egypt definitely did not want to look like it was collaborating in a black market to charge Palestinians tens of thousands of dollars to save their lives.

By the beginning of this year, it did look like that. By February and March, there were reports that the main company offering travel coordination at the Rafah border was making a million dollars a day off Palestinians. The manic economy was reined in. New rules. No more hiring brokers in Gaza to help you register to leave. No more paying by phone. No more free-for-all bribes at the border.

There would only be one company allowed to register people to leave Gaza, an Egyptian company called Hala with close ties to the Egyptian military and security services. And now, if you wanted to register, you needed to send someone to the Hala offices in Cairo in person. And not just anyone-- a first-degree relative. And you'd need to pay in cash-- $5,000 for an adult, $2,500 for a kid, American dollars only. It's like a dare. How could anyone in Gaza pull this off?

This new system for getting out of Gaza kicked in just as Israel announced its plans for an offensive in Rafah, just as Manal told Yousef she was ready to leave. A new, much more rigid system that made it much, much harder to get out. Yousef couldn't talk about how he raised that much money, in dollars, and got it to the Hala office in Cairo and how he did it fast enough to register to get on the list in order to maybe make it out in time. Most Palestinians in Gaza didn't want to talk about any of that either. So I reached a Palestinian outside of Gaza on the West Bank.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I knew the system was outrageous, but I didn't know-know until I talked to Bushra. Bushra Khalidi lives in the West Bank in Ramallah. She's Palestinian. Her husband's family is from Gaza, and Bushra wanted to help them get out, seven people, $30,000, which she didn't have and had to fundraise.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Short version-- she needed someone else to help her set up the GoFundMe page. And the way she found that person, her brother-in-law is in a band that tours and knew someone in the US who could help them set up the page. Pretty quickly, talking to Bushra, I got a picture that this is the kind of person you need on your team if your family has any chance of getting out.

Bushra is a lawyer. She speaks perfect English. She works for a global NGO, Oxfam. She's used to navigating bureaucracies in multiple languages. She has connections in countries all over the world. To navigate this complex process, you need someone who can make things happen. You need a Bushra or a Yousef. Apparently, you also need to know someone who's in a band.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The GoFundMe worked, but it wasn't enough. They raised $20,000. They needed $30,000 for the Hala fees. Bushra and her husband were already sending money constantly into Gaza, money to pay for $200 bags of flour, for transportation every time the family had to move-- five times. Bushra knew if the family made it to Cairo, they wouldn't be allowed to work, so they'd need help paying for housing and food there, too. So actually, Bushra realized, they needed $50,000.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I talked to people in Gaza who sold the cars they were living in to pay for these fees. I heard about families that sold their furniture, took out loans, families who hit up aunts and cousins and extended family across multiple countries until every family member's savings was drained. And once you did that, had the money in hand, it wasn't over.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Once the sister arrived in Cairo, Bushra then had to figure out how do I get her the cash so she can go in person to register the family at the Hala office. Bushra had a friend in Egypt.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The Hala company. The sister-in-law stood in line, paid the money, and then they waited for the names of Bushra's in-laws to show up on the list. Bushra and her family were stuck checking the same strange Telegram channel Yousef was, the one with the screenshots of this life-or-death list.

The wait was excruciating. Bushra didn't want to think or talk about it. Her sister-in-law wanted to talk about it all the time. They were all watching the news and the list. On April 14, their names appeared on the list. The family left the next day.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Never met her in-laws because Israeli restrictions make it very hard to travel between the West Bank and Gaza.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This brings us back to Yousef. Yousef, who knew this, he knew leaving Gaza meant he would not be the same person. And still, Yousef was going through all these steps through a system designed to frustrate, deter, and bankrupt him. Yousef's version of this process, raising an astounding amount of money, getting the cash in dollars physically to the Hala office, Yousef's maneuvers were not the exact same as Bushra's, but they were just as involved and absurd, right up until he was registered and waiting for permission to do something he did not want to do.

When he was growing up, Yousef's uncle used to tell him he reminded him of his grandfather. He grew up hearing this a lot, the similarities to his grandfather. And Yousef got it. His grandfather hustled, made things happen. He was resourceful. But Yousef has been thinking about this lately, what it meant to be like his grandfather, what else it meant.

His grandfather is the one who got everyone to Jabalia, to the refugee camp in the north of Gaza, when they were all pushed out of their homes in what is now Israel in 1948. His grandfather is the one who made sure everyone got set up in the same place next to each other, made sure they survived, had housing, had their needs met. He made sure they were safe, and they were together. And they were.

Jabalia Camp became a small city. People moved to bigger apartments nearby, had kids, but the family stayed safe and right next to each other. 75 years later, Yousef was the one who moved his sisters and their families to a tent camp in Rafah so they could all be nearby, safe and together.

They were there for three months when Yousef heard from a contact in Egypt, a friend with connections at the Hala Company, who told him that his family's names were likely to be listed in the next week. He wasn't just failing at keeping the family together. He was the one who was going to split them up.

Yousef left through the Rafah crossing the next day. That day, his family saw the world outside Gaza for the first time. The kids were amazed by the electricity in Cairo and the trees. Trees in Gaza have been cut down now to use for fire. When Illya and Ahmed started to tell their cousins in Gaza about the watermelon they were eating and the playground they played on, Yousef had to tell them to keep that kind of thing to themselves from now on.

Manal took the children to the market and bought chocolate. Yousef sat at the computer, continuing to try to make plans for his sisters, trying to figure out where were the Israeli tanks now, what might their approach into Rafah be, what was the intensity of the bombing that day, and what did it mean. Were the NGOs leaving Rafah yet? Were other people leaving? Was it time for his sisters to move somewhere else in Gaza?

Then, on May 6, the Israeli military sent tanks into Rafah. The invasion had finally started. That same day, there was news that Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire. It was very confusing, but for a couple hours, it seemed like maybe there was going to be a ceasefire.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Yousef was suddenly back to the person I remembered talking to for every other move before this last one-- energized, frantic.

Chana Joffe-Walt

But that day, there was no ceasefire. And the next day, the Israeli military seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt and closed the border. There was no way back. Yousef would be in one world. His sisters would be back home in another.

Ira Glass

Chana Joffe-Walt is one of the producers of our show. Chana's story about Yousef was edited by Laura Starecheski and Nancy Updike. Our episode today was produced by Aviva DeKornfeld. The people who put together today's episode include Jendayi Bonds, Zoe Chace, Michael Comite, Emmanuel Dzotsi, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Safiyah Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Reporting, research, and Arabic translation from Hany Hawasly. Arabic interpreting from Emna Zghal and Sawsan Abdelatif. Arabic voiceover by Leem Lubany. Additional reporting by Fatma and by Dana Ballout.

Special thanks to all the reporters at Mada Masr and the Organized Crime, Corruption, and Reporting Project. Thanks also to Shaina Low, Mona Chalabi, Miriam Marmur, Tara Abboud, Adam Bakri, and Rania Mustafa. Casting help from Sabrina Hyman.

Our website, if you're going on a long drive, going on a vacation, looking for something to listen to, over 800 episodes of our program streaming for absolutely free. ThisAmericanLife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's cofounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He keeps getting pulled into these spats on X, especially with this one guy. Torey couldn't remember his name, Elon something.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.