Nasr City, a suburb of Cairo, is far from poor. Once it may even have aspired to affluence, but overcrowding and chaotic construction have created an urban jungle that now feels uniformly drab. The streets are congested, shopping malls have proliferated and there is nothing to break the monotony of its endless rows of unadorned, desert-hued apartment blocks. Nasr is large and anonymous, a permanent churn of arrivals and departures. Perhaps that explains why so many refugees have made it their home in recent years, at least those who arrive in Cairo with a little money or a job. There are Syrians, Somali, Sudanese, and Palestinians here. Each group brings painful memories with them, but Cairo seems capable of taking everything in, simply adding the new pain to the stock of local miseries. Egyptians who made some money working in the Gulf before returning home have also bought apartments here, but those who made real money would have moved elsewhere.
The shops and restaurants in Nasr have started to reflect the changing population. There are several cheap Syrian and Palestinian eateries serving hummus along the main commercial streets. A famous fish restaurant from Gaza has opened nearby. Another recent addition is Qasr Alnada, the Palace of Dew, a brightly lit pastry shop bursting with a dozen varieties of baklava, warbat sprinkled with pistachio, harissa and knafeh. My favourite is knafeh Nabulsieh, made with stretchy cheese from Nablus in the West Bank. There is a long line of patrons waiting for their orders. Almost all are Palestinian, immediately recognisable by their accent. The man waiting in line behind me has been in Cairo for more than 20 years, but others have arrived since last October and often meet old acquaintances from Gaza by chance in Qasr Alnada. The shop was famous in the Strip. After the war began, the owner moved it to Cairo.
After a few minutes impatiently waiting for my knafeh, I carry my plate to one of the tables outside and sit with Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. Abusada left Gaza last November. His university was destroyed and then looted by Israeli forces. His home was also damaged in an Israeli strike, after which he spent three days with his family living on the street. Abusada lived comfortably in Gaza City in a good neighbourhood near Abu Mazen Square, and enjoyed the prestige that comes with an academic position in Palestinian society. I want to know when he realised what would happen to Gaza after the Hamas attacks a year ago on 7 October. He interrupts me: “I had two choices: to live or to die. I wanted to live.” For him at least, what was to come was immediately clear. And staying meant choosing death.
His older children are American citizens, so he was able to leave relatively easily. Now the family is all in Cairo, but Abusada must rebuild his life from scratch, a common fate among Palestinians. He has no plans to return to Gaza anytime soon. His younger daughter, Sarah, was preparing for the tawjihi, the university entrance exams in Gaza and the West Bank, when they arrived in Cairo. Abusada told her she should forget about the tawjihi for a year. Sarah disagreed, posting a motto above her bed: “No desperation with life and no life with desperation.” The Palestinian embassy in Cairo, together with the Ministry of Education in Ramallah in the West Bank and the Egyptian authorities, was able to organise the tawjihi in Cairo. She passed the exam and has now been admitted to the Faculty of Law at the British University in Egypt.
I ask Abusada what Hamas might have been thinking when it launched the October attacks. The Azhar professor corrects me: “I would say what [Yahya] Sinwar was thinking.” He is not convinced that even the broader Hamas leadership was aware of the plans. Abusada met the Hamas top leader once, a few years ago. He thinks Sinwar was motivated by the desire to reach a prisoner exchange deal with Israel. He had made promises to Hamas fighters in Israeli prisons and needed hostages in order to bring about their release. But there is another reason, Abusada adds: “Megalomania.” By kidnapping women, the elderly, and even children – acts Abusada says are indefensible – Sinwar made it easier for Israel to justify Gaza’s destruction as the world watched.
“This conflict has been going on for 76 years,” he explains. “The Palestinians have been subjected to occupation, aggression, house demolition, mass arrest, you name it. I was in Gaza on that day, on 7 October. The Palestinians were very joyful because for a moment they felt they are making the Israelis drink from the same glass we have been drinking for the past 76 years. This is an Arabic saying.” Both Abusada and other Palestinians in Cairo tell me that the reactions to Hamas’s attack in the Strip varied according to age. Older people woke up to the news on 7 October with a deep sense of foreboding. Among the young, who have never known any reality outside Gaza, for whom the very idea of leaving its walls was no more than a dream, there was a sense of joy when the news started to circulate.
A question intrudes itself: how many Palestinians have left Gaza for Egypt since October? The number I kept hearing from both Palestinian and Egyptian authorities is something like 150,000. Not all have registered at the Palestinian embassy, so the number could be even higher. One Palestinian community organiser in Cairo told me it would have reached 300,000 had Israel not closed the Rafah crossing in May.
Some of these, if they held passports for a third country, will have since moved elsewhere, but it seems safe to say that more than 100,000 remain in Egypt, almost all in the greater Cairo region. This reality may come as a surprise to many; it’s barely discussed. The obvious reason for the silence is that a very high percentage of those leaving Gaza had to pay a fee to Egyptian firms close to the security establishment. The fee may vary but hovers around $10,000 per person, bringing the total revenue since October to something well above a billion.
Egyptian security keeps a close eye on recent Palestinian exiles. During my time in Nasr, this is obvious. Palestinians are not concerned that Israel or Hamas might continue to make their life difficult in Cairo, but they do fear getting in trouble with Egyptian security forces. Political activity of any kind could land you in a high-security Egyptian prison. In a striking symbol of the Palestinian plight, those arriving from Gaza cannot even be deported; where would they be deported to? No country will take them, and Israel will not allow them back in Gaza or into the West Bank. They exist as invisible people in Cairo. With very few exceptions, they are not allowed to work or study, cannot receive residency status and must live on the charity of others or meagre savings which, after a year, have now been completely exhausted. There is no way to legalise your status in Egypt in order to find work. One Palestinian who left Gaza years ago and recently spent three months in Cairo told me that “the dark side is that [if] you are sitting without work, there is nothing to do but watch television 24 hours a day, follow the horror 24 hours a day, waiting for a ceasefire that never comes.” This is the rule for many Palestinians in Egypt. Qasr Alnada is a joyful place, but it remains an exception.
Governmental secondary schools in Egypt do not allow Palestinian students to enrol in classes, so recent exiled schoolchildren have been forced to join West Bank classes online or, in some cases, to organise their own lessons in Cairo, taught by volunteer teachers that have themselves arrived from Gaza.
Even those who had a comfortable life in Gaza often arrive in Cairo with little or no money. Their property and savings may have been destroyed or lost in the war. They probably had to pay an exit fee and then there is the endless need to succour those left behind in the Strip. To live in Nasr is possible only for the lucky: to an apartment rent will cost something like $300 or $400. Those who arrived injured from the bombing will leave the hospital in Cairo – without limbs, blind or crippled or having lost their parents – and struggle to find food. Most Palestinians from Gaza now live in Cairo’s poor areas like Faisal Street or Imbaba. A select few, however – those who were able to bring small fortunes from Gaza – live in gated compounds with elegant names outside Cairo.
Omar Shaban, founder and director of the non-profit Pal-Think for Strategic Studies, also left Gaza for Cairo after October. He told me that “this community in Cairo represents the whole social structure [of Gaza]. There are more than 250 journalists, some 400 who work in banking, many work as software developers online and were able to keep working online, maybe 500 work with international organisations, tens of thousands of educators, at least 20,000 schoolchildren from age six to 18, 1500 Palestinian students who were lucky to do their tawjihi here in Egypt.”
The sense of community is strong. “Those who are in Cairo can make the change for the future,” he explained, immediately adding that he, like the rest of the community, feels an obligation to go back. “The majority want to go back.” He tells me about the 2,000 Palestinians who are currently stranded in a couple of buildings in Arish, close to Rafah, waiting to be allowed to return to Gaza.
A short walk from Qasr Alnada, I enter a creaky elevator in one of the many nondescript buildings covering the whole of Nasr City. Reaching one of the top floors, I am left waiting several minutes by an apartment door. Tawfiq Rizk, the young man I am supposed to meet, doesn’t respond to the bell. It turns out, he is praying. When I finally enter his living room, the prayer mat is still on the floor.
An uncle with whom he and his sister share the apartment brings me Turkish coffee and we sit in faded gild wood armchairs, left behind from the building’s happier past occupants. There will be many servings of coffee and then mint tea as Rizk recounts the story of how he left Gaza to find medical help for his injured sister, leaving his wife behind.
Rizk comes from a large family of ten daughters and four brothers. He is 27, and the oldest brother. The family lived in Rafah, not far from the famous crossing into Egypt. His father had a brick factory, manufacturing construction bricks from West Bank granite, and their house was next to the factory. Rizk worked with his father in the family business. He married his wife in 2021, but they struggled to have children. Eventually, she did get pregnant through artificial insemination, but two months into the pregnancy, in November 2023, Israel bombed a building near their home and his wife went into shock. She had a miscarriage.
Rizk’s family faced another tragedy on 3 December, a Sunday. On that day, late in the evening, Israeli forces bombed the brick factory and the family home. I asked Rizk why.
“Was there a warning from the Israelis?”
“No.”
“Were any of the family members associated with Hamas?”
“No,” he said. “We were very much regular people who go from work to home.”
It is easy to find conclusive signs that Rizk and his family do not have any links to Hamas. If any suspicion of such links existed, he would not have been allowed to leave Gaza. His uncle has lived in Cairo since 2007, when Hamas wrested control of Gaza from Fatah. And the way Rizk speaks about the future of Gaza would never be shared by someone with sympathy for Hamas. When I asked him about his opinion of Hamas, he replied: “Hamas as fighters are excellent; as a government and administration they are a failure.”
Next to the factory there was an olive press to manufacture olive oil, Rizk explained. The bombing happened during the season when villagers bring olives to be pressed into oil, and it so happened that the week before there had been a short ceasefire – the only ceasefire so far – allowing villagers to collect their olives. Might one of those people had a connection to Hamas?
Rizk doesn’t know, but it’s his best theory as to why Israel decided to fire three missiles into the area. The bombing took place in the evening, close to sunset. At that point, work had ended for the day. Rizk’s father was sitting with two of his daughters inside the factory. When his body was found, he was already dead. The two daughters were half-buried in the rubble but both survived. The factory, built of corrugated steel, was completely destroyed. 52 people were killed and 90 were injured in the strike, most of them in the olive oil press. These strikes in Rafah were not uncommon even before Israel invaded in May. Another of Rizk’s brothers was killed in a different attack in January.
Aya, one of the two daughters injured in the attack, had surgery while still in Gaza but the procedure took a bad turn. She contracted a painful and life-threatening bone infection, and was authorised to leave the city with a medical certificate to be treated at a hospital in Arish, just across the border, where she and Rizk stayed for 28 days. After Arish, Aya was transferred to Cairo for further treatment, which continues to this day. She has gone through three surgeries in total. Rizk showed me the medical certificate and his story was confirmed by two independent sources.
When Rizk left Gaza in January, few thought the Rafah crossing would be closed. He expected to return soon to rejoin his wife and mother, but the treatments kept being prolonged and then, in May, Israel closed the crossing. Rizk’s wife now lives in a tent in the so-called safe area of Mawasi in Rafah, where missile strikes regularly take place.
Near the end of our conversation, Rizk told me that if he could bring his whole family to Egypt he would never return to Gaza. There is no future there, he said. His life has been shattered and there is nothing to rebuild.
His young sister, Aya, sitting across from us, disagrees. She misses Gaza. She is a frail girl, thin with a limp and a shy smile. I ask her if she feels better and she says yes, but then adds that her hip still hurts. She misses Gaza and she misses her mother, with whom she is able to chat on her phone. Aya is only nine years old and still recovering from her injuries, spending much of the day searching for news from Gaza on television and in her phone chats. She misses her madrassa, a school for young girls her age. She dreams of one day returning but can’t fathom what Gaza might be like now.
“I miss my classmates,” Aya told me. “So many have been killed in the war.”
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[See also: A year after 7 October, what does it mean to be human now?]
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