‘There is no place safe’
Plymouth family returns home after more than a month in Gaza
After more than a month trapped in war-torn Gaza, it was the sight of an old friend that made Hazem Shafai grin from ear to ear.
Shafai, his wife, Sanaa Shafai, and their three children had endured the threat of airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, struggled with little food, water, and medicine, and the constant fear living in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war.
But as the family strode through Logan International Airport Tuesday afternoon, their last stop before heading home to Plymouth, Shafai turned his attention to a shout of “Hello!” from his longtime friend Saber Said. The two men clasped hands, then pulled one another into a warm, silent embrace.
Later, Shafai, 47, said in an interview it had been the support of friends who had helped him and his family survive, and finally make it home safe.
“I want to thank a lot of people in my life,” Shafai said. “I don’t know how I’m going to thank them, but they did a huge favor for us, made a difference.”
While they returned home safely, the family’s thoughts were with loved ones who remain in harm’s way in Gaza, they told reporters during an airport news conference.
“I have my dad, and I have a very big family over there,” said Sanaa Shafai, 36. “So, I don’t feel the joy [of returning to the US]. But I feel safe, and relieved that my kids are safe.”
They arrived home about a week after another Massachusetts family — Abood Okal, his wife Wafaa Abuzayda, and their son, Yousef, of Medway — returned home from Gaza.
The Plymouth couple and their children, daughters Seera, 13, and Yomna,10, and 2-year-old son Jasser, had been on a family vacation in Gaza when Hamas militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7 and killed about 1,200 people.
Since the fighting began, more than 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, according to the Hamascontrolled government. Most of the territory’s 2.3 million people have been displaced from their homes.
The family had been visiting Shafai’s father in Beit Lahia, a city in northern Gaza, when the war broke out. Early that morning, they awoke to the sound of rockets and explosions, Shafai said. They knew they needed to leave.
Despite their American citizen-
ship, the family waited for more than a month to hear from US officials on when they would be allowed to enter Egypt through the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza, they said.
They had to take refuge in several shelters to escape Israeli airstrikes, and could hear and feel the ground shake during several blasts. They described horrific scenes of bodies buried under rubble and people running in fear that their home was the next target of an airstrike.
While they waited to leave Gaza, several of them battled the flu, and their young son suffered fever and nausea. Shafai said they tried to take him to a hospital, but with so many injured in Gaza, they had to wait until they got to Cairo before he received hospital care.
“There is no place safe in Gaza, there is no place,” Hazem Shafai said.
They voiced frustration with the war, and the notion that Hamas was the target of the Israeli attacks.
In a follow-up interview, Shafai said most people in Gaza aren’t involved in the fighting.
“We want people to understand — most people in Gaza have nothing to do with Hamas or Israel,” he said. “They just want to live a normal life.”
Sanaa Shafai’s cousin was killed by an airstrike while walking to a bakery for bread, she said. The attacks on the densely populated Gaza Strip are injuring and killing many people, including children, she said.
Of the war, she told reporters: “I hope this will end very soon.”
Complicating matters, they were allowed to cross into Egypt Nov. 2 — but a bureaucratic snafu meant only Hazem and Sanaa’s names were on the list, but not their children.
US lawmakers, including Democratic Representative Bill Keating of Massachusetts and Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota, helped finally to get them across the border on Nov. 6.
They flew from Cairo to Paris, and then on to Boston — a roughly 19-hour trip — according to Shafai’s brother, Hami Shafai, of South Dakota.
Hami Shafai worked with the lawmakers to help get the family out. He praised their efforts, as well as the support of the family’s friends and neighbors in Massachusetts.
“They’ve been like family,” Hami Shafai said of the supporters during a phone interview Tuesday.
Hazem Shafai, speaking to a Boston Globe reporter, said the support of loved ones and friends helped keep his hope alive.
As he spoke, one of his daughters quietly walked up to his side and took his hand. It was time to go home, finally, to Plymouth.
“It’s been a long trip, but we made it,” he said.