Desperate Gazans use crowdsourcing to bribe their way into Egypt

By Fares al-Ghoul – Bloomberg

As they endure missiles, displacement, disease and starvation, some Gazans are raising money online to pay bribes to Egyptian officials at the Rafah border to get family members out to safety.

With the crossing essentially shut, few Palestinians have been able to leave Gaza since the outbreak of the Israeli aggression on Gaza on October 7.

But a relative few have found that with enough money — as much as $10,000 per person — they can get out. And they’re seeking help online.

One of them is Yasmin, a Gaza City resident who said she’s raised €28,000 ($31,000) on GoFundMe and evacuated her mother, three sisters and a niece to Egypt.

She said she paid $6,500 for each person “through a coordinator.”

“My sister is ill and she is now in the hospital,” Yasmin said by phone, asking that her family name not be published to avoid possible reprisals. “Without the ‘coordination,’ we don’t know what would have happened to her. This was the only way to get out of Gaza.”

Egypt says no bribery is taking place. Diaa Rashwan, head of the Egypt State Information Service, denied the official collection of any additional fees from those coming from Gaza. He also rejected allegations that any unofficial entity is charging a fee to help people cross into Egyptian territories.

But Aya, a Palestinian who returned to visit her family in Gaza after a year abroad in the United Arab Emirates, describes a different reality.

She arrived pregnant last summer and delivered her first baby in Gaza. She decided to stay with her family for a while before reuniting with her husband in the UAE; a month later, the war broke out.

After Israel’s air strikes started, Aya, her parents, siblings and newborn daughter fled repeatedly before reaching the southern city of Khan Younis, where she was later wounded by shrapnel and rushed to a hospital.

“All I wanted back then was to get out of Gaza and return to my husband,” she said by phone. “A mediator reached out to my husband after seeing his Facebook posts asking how to get me out.”

The mediator asked for $13,000 to get Aya and her baby on the list. After bargaining, the sum was reduced to $10,000.

“My husband got a loan to pay for the costs,” she said.

Aya was able to cross the border when her name appeared on the lists provided by Egypt to the authorities in Gaza running the Palestinian side of Rafah.

Rafah is Gaza’s main gateway to the outside world but it’s never been easy to pass through. Cairo has kept the crossing point mostly closed since Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group by the US and the European Union, took control of the seaside enclave by force from the internationally-recognized Palestinian Authority in 2007.

Hard crossing

While it’s been open on a more regular, Sunday-to-Thursday basis in recent years, border crossings were restricted to a few hundred people a day. Tens of thousands who wished to exit needed to register weeks or months in advance with Hamas authorities.

A paid service known as “tanseeq,” which means coordination in Arabic, provided by local tourism companies with connections to Egypt, required a sum ranging from $300 to $800, depending on how busy the travel season was.

But after the war broke out, travel was further restricted to dual-nationals and permanent residents of foreign countries, who started to leave Gaza in October under evacuation missions facilitated by their respective embassies. The Hamas-run health ministry said only a few hundred wounded patients managed to leave for advanced medical care through Rafah.

Weeks later, the “coordination” lists returned, published by the Gaza interior ministry, and the mechanism to get onto the coveted lists was vague. Instead, scores of online campaigns sprung up as word spread about the pricey “coordination.”

The appeals often describe death, loss, fear and displacement. They list where the donated money would be spent, and usually say a big chunk is to pay for “coordination” to cross the border.

Nour Zaqout, who left Gaza recently to pursue a masters degree in Malta, is organizing an online fund-raiser to evacuate 10 members of her family, including her parents, siblings and grandmother.

She wrote that with a “substantial sum of $7,000 to $10,000” for each person to cross the border, “the burden is overwhelming.”

“Simply, all possible ways to save our family have hit a deadlock, so I took this decision after three months of thinking,” Zaqout said in an interview. “I was hesitant. Organizing a fund-raiser was the last thing I had thought of.”

Zaqout hopes to raise $70,000.

“There is no hope for the future in Gaza,” she said. “Not even after the war.”