Gaza Refugees In Cairo Struggle With Uncertainty When To Return Home

Gaza/DK UNICEF Refugees

JAKARTA - A few weeks after the ceasefire in Gaza, thousands of Palestinians departing for neighboring Egypt grappled with the question of when they could return to their hometowns.

They rejected the prospect of mass evacuation proposed by US President Donald Trump.

"Many people were devastated, and I am one of them," said Shorouk, who made a living selling Palestinian food in Cairo, known as Gaza Girl.

"Did you choose to come back and sit in the midst of the devastation and a place that still needs to be rebuilt or stay and come back when it's rebuilt?" he said.

Whether or not he will return home soon, Shorouk does not want people like him to be accepted as residents outside Palestinian soil.

"We Gazans can only live in Gaza," he said.

"If they give us a place to live, the struggle will be lost," he continued.

Trump's proposal for most of Gaza's population to be moved and sent en masse to Egypt and Jordan to be universally criticized throughout the world of Arabia as a form of ethnic cleansing.

"You're talking about one and a half million people, and we've just cleaned everything up," Trump said.

When asked if this is a temporary or long-term solution, he said: "It could be".

Egypt said it would never participate in the mass evacuation of Palestinians, which President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi described as an act of injustice.

But there are already around 100,000 Palestinians in Egypt, who say they don't know how or when they can return.

During the war in Gaza, most of the borders were closed and most of the 2.3 million residents were homeless and forced to stay in temporary shelters in the region.

But there were several months when some people were allowed to leave, including Palestinians with foreign passports, their close relatives, or patients who were seriously ill were evacuated for humanitarian reasons.

Most of them do not have long-term stay permits in Egypt and consider their stay only temporary, survival by trading or saving.

The ceasefire agreement that halted fighting in January has yet to complete their fate.

They said they would come back as soon as possible.

"Nothing is better than a country and someone's land," said Hussien Farehat, father of two.

However, there are also those who say that personal decisions are more complicated, because there is no home to return.

Even if the war is over, we still don't know our fate and no one mentions those stranded in Cairo. Will we come back or what will happen to us? and if we come back, what will happen to us? Our house is gone," Abeer Kamal, who has lived in Cairo since November 2023 and is selling handmade bags with his sister.

"It's okay, not my house, or my family, or my brother, nothing," he said.

Although Gazans in Egypt have different private plans, all say they reject Trump's proposal to expel large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza.

"This is our land and it doesn't belong to us," said Fares Mahmoud, another Gaza citizen in Cairo.

"This is our land, we leave it and go back there whenever we want," he said.