In Gaza, they owned olive trees, flower gardens, factories, stores and homes they had built and tended for decades. They had memories bound up in family photos, in knickknacks, in embroidered shawls. They had cars to drive, classes to attend, the beach minutes away.
Now, in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled, they find themselves in rented apartments overlooking concrete. They have few job prospects, dwindling savings and no schools for the children — a new world they know is safe, but hardly feels like a future.
Without legal status in Egypt or clarity about when Gaza might again offer a semblance of normal life, most are stuck: unable to build lives, try their luck in a third country or plan on returning home.
Physically, the Palestinians are in Egypt. Mentally, they are holding on to the memory of a Gaza that no longer exists.
“We have this feeling that this is just a temporary period in our lives,” said Nahla al-Bashti, 60, who arrived in Egypt with her family from Gaza in December. Desperate for income, she recently began selling pomegranate molasses and other Palestinian foods from her tiny rented kitchen, missing all the while the fruit trees in her old yard.
“We want our real lives back,” she said. “I feel suffocated.”
But just how temporary this period is remains an open question. For Gazans, Egypt is unstable ground — a country that proclaims support for the Palestinian cause and denounces the war in Gaza, but whose wariness of Hamas has led it, alongside Israel, to blockade the impoverished territory for 17 years.
Though Egypt has been a crucial conduit for humanitarian aid to Gaza during the war, officials adamantly oppose allowing in large numbers of Palestinian refugees, warning that they could threaten national security and that emptying Gaza of its people would torpedo the prospect of a future Palestinian state.
Yet as many as 100,000 Gazans have managed to cross, the Palestinian ambassador in Cairo has said, whether through connections, by paying unofficial brokers, or as one of the badly wounded or severely ill people the Egyptian government has sponsored for treatment.
When she and her family stepped over the border, Shereen Sabbah, 25, a translator from Gaza City, said she felt sick at leaving Gaza. They were about to be homeless, friendless and jobless.
“It’s like being eaten from the inside,” said Ms. Sabbah, whose family paid to escape Gaza using private donations.
The house Ms. Sabbah and her sisters grew up in was destroyed, along with the olive and citrus groves around it. So was her brother-in-law’s business, a car-repair garage, she said. Their savings were nearly gone. Their parents and other siblings were still dodging bombs in Gaza.
“You basically have no future, no past, nothing,” said Ms. Sabbah’s sister, Fatma Shaban, 31.
Everything in Egypt felt strange.
The Palestinians had spent so long without meat, fruit or vegetables, without electricity, without showers. The abundance of Egypt, the safety of it, came as a shock.
But they could not forget that their families in Gaza had none of it.
“We couldn’t comprehend the war we went through, where our only concern was finding food and surviving. And then we were in another world where people were living normal lives,” said Husam al-Batniji, 28, an architect who fled Gaza for Cairo along with his family. “And we asked, why can’t we live a normal life, too?”
The Palestinians’ emotional unmooring is mirrored by their legal limbo in Egypt.
Once the 45-day tourist visa most arrivals receive expires, Palestinians cannot obtain the residency papers to open bank accounts and businesses, apply for visas to other countries or enroll their children in Egyptian public schools.
Nor can they officially register with the United Nations agency that assists refugees in Egypt from Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. Egypt has not given consent for it to take on Palestinians, said Rula Amin, an agency spokeswoman.
The U.N. agency that supports Palestinians lacks a legal mandate to operate in Egypt. Since the current war began, no countries have accepted large numbers of Palestinians for permanent resettlement or refuge.
Arab countries fear Israel will try to turn the Gazans’ exile into a permanent expulsion, generating political and security complications and threatening future Palestinian statehood. For similar reasons, Western countries publicly say Gazans should be able to stay in Gaza and anti-immigrant sentiment at home could also make it difficult to take in large numbers.
In Egypt’s case, the government is nervous that Gazans displaced to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which borders Gaza and Israel, will become radicalized. The fear is that they could join existing Sinai militant groups that have vexed Egypt for years or launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil.
In Cairo, Palestinians say, they feel daunted by the hourslong commutes across the megacity and too big for the rented rooms they cannot stop comparing to their houses. They left those homes thinking they would soon be back. Now they own almost nothing except a little clothing and the phones they check, almost incessantly, to make sure their families back in Gaza are still alive.
Ms. al-Bashti kept scrutinizing photos of her old neighborhood on the news, frantic. Was the water tank still there? Then their house must be OK, she kept telling herself, until relatives sent her a photo of the hill of rubble it had become.
“When I buy something here, I say, ‘Oh, I’ll use it in my garden,’” she said, “and then I remember — we have no more garden.”
The losses swell from there.
Dozens of the al-Batnijis’ relatives have been killed in the war, according to family members. They left behind a jewelry factory and store and multigenerational homes that Mr. al-Batniji’s father had spent a quarter-century building.
In Egypt, his father has no capital to open a factory and no heart to start anew, Mr. al-Batniji said. So they scratch out a living however they can, his brother peddling used clothes, Mr. al-Batniji freelancing online for architecture firms.
Through Egyptian volunteers, Ms. Shaban got an offer from an Egyptian company. But after her first, bewildering 2.5-hour bus commute, she quit: It was too far, and her traumatized children needed her at home, she said.
Another stranger found her work translating videos for a professor’s research, while her sister, Ms. Sabbah, works remotely translating for a Canadian immigration agency. But a third sister, Ola, a photographer, cannot find work.
Ms. Shaban’s 12-year-old and 10-year-old are set to start online classes with a West Bank school. But with the family’s one laptop needed for the adults’ jobs, the children will be catching up on eight months of missed education from their parents’ phones.
Recognizing how anxious parents are about their children’s educations, Egyptian volunteers recently opened a learning center in Cairo for about 350 children who fled Gaza during the war. The center’s founder, Israa Ali, realized early on that they needed to design the classes with trauma in mind, and to keep therapists on hand.
One young girl broke down about her family — mostly dead or missing — while drawing, Ms. Ali said. Other children leap from their seats mid-class, seized by the need to make sure their siblings are safe.
“In one split second, they can get triggered by anything,” Ms. Ali said. “You will never understand that you’re in the same room as a child who got pulled out of the rubble and in that process, lost three of their siblings and their parents.”
Money is too tight, and Ms. Shaban and her husband too occupied with thoughts of Gaza, for them to give the kids the outings they beg for. The one time she took them to the movies, she said, they shot under their seats as soon as the trailers started, blasting them with sound. For a moment, her own breath froze.
The Palestinians in Egypt debate all the time whether to stay or go back. If they do, will there be schools? Or water, sewage, electricity?
Fatma Shaban and Ola Sabbah wanted to seek stability in another country, perhaps in the Gulf, though they have no way of applying for visas. Someday, they still hope to return.
“The problem is not with Gaza — I love Gaza. The problem is with the future of my children,” Ms. Shaban said. “How long will it take to rebuild Gaza? Years, decades, months? You don’t know.”
But for Shereen Sabbah, the answer was clear.
“This place, it’s safe, but it’s not home to me,” she said. “Because home is Gaza to me.”
Emad Mekay contributed reporting.
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