Youmna El-Sayed speaking at the Gaza In Focus event in Johannesburg on Wednesday, 21 August 2024. [Picture: Nasreen Naidoo / Salaamedia]
When the sun goes down in Gaza, nightfall brings no reprieve for the enclave’s two million inhabitants. The bedtime stories Youmna El-Sayed used to tell her children – before they fled the war – were not those of Little Red Riding Hood and Goodnight Moon, but about missiles and murder.
Living in the Gaza Strip as a reporter for Al Jazeera, El-Sayed’s mission was to tell the world what was really going on. But the stories she compiled for her detached global audience brought herself and her family under constant danger.
Whenever the mother of four went to report on the latest Israeli attack, she put herself in the line of fire. As it turned out, the occupation forces never really respected media freedom and frequently went right after journalists. She knew she was in danger.
“I didn’t feel safe. I knew that at home they weren’t safe either. But I had to continue reporting, because it wasn’t about me,” she told a gathering in Johannesburg on Wednesday.
At night, when she would tuck her children into bed, they were still stalked by danger.
At any moment, a 900 kg dumb bomb (to give just one example) could land with a bang onto their home. In a swipe, they would almost certainly become one of the thousand other Palestinian civilians murdered in Israel’s supposed hunt for Hamas.
“Every single night, we spoke about how a missile would fall on us and kill us,” she said. This was the unusual, but telling, bedtime story a mother would narrate to her children in their home on a battleground.
“We made jokes about it,” she said, repeating, “We made jokes about it.”
“Our bedtime stories were how rapid and smooth being killed by a missile would be; that you don’t have to worry, it’s going to finish really fast. It won’t take time. You won’t feel anything. You won’t go through the pain.”
Roughly two months after the war began, Youmna and her husband Salahaldin were compelled to uproot their children and leave Gaza. Aline (13), Mohammed (12), Cerine (9) and Joury (6) would have to leave the city they had known for all their lives, catapulted into uncertainty.
They paid a premium to spare their lives. Leaving one’s crushed hopes and life under the rubble in besieged Gaza costs desperate Palestinians a fortune.
Travel agencies in neighbouring Egypt have no qualms profiting from their plight. At the very least, it costs $5 000 (R89 000) to get an adult, and $2 500 (R44 500) to get a child, across the border and away from the dangers of war, according to The Economist.
“We had to deal with brokers who bargained on how much they’re going to be taking from you in order to give you that privilege of being able to cross into safety, where you can literally run to save your life and the lives of your children,” she said.
But it also comes with a massive emotional price tag. And so it comes with the cost of adjusting to life in a land so close yet so far from home.
“We escaped the hell in Gaza just to find ourselves in an open air prison called Egypt, where you were not granted, as a Palestinian, residency or a permit to work, or a permit for education.”
In the refuge of Egypt, the bedtime stories Youmna tells her children may not be about missiles and murder, but now they can dream about the day when they finally get to return home, to a liberated Palestine
