Families left worlds apart by narrow crossing

RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Anyone walking along the border between the Palestinian side and the Egyptian side of Rafah City can feel the restrictions imposed on the Gaza Strip and how enclosed and controlled life is for the 1.8 million people living there. It’s suffocating, designed to make people feel as if they cannot breathe. It fills one with an urgency to escape this collective punishment, and forfeit one's ancestral home and memories - good or bad.

But Ahmed Aburtema feels differently about this area. He walks alone for hours. He sits and makes notes and walks again between the trees on the top of a hill overlooking his grandmother’s home. A fence stands in his way, and behind the fence stand Egyptian troops with AK-47s amid bulldozers, now silent after levelling houses. Just behind the bulldozers are the remains of his mother’s home.

He points to a desolate place in the distance, telling Middle East Eye: “Over there is my mom’s home - or what is left of it now.”

In the past 20 years, he has only officially been allowed to see his mother twice. Things could never return to the way they were after all those years. His father remained on the Palestinian side of Rafah while his mother stayed in Egyptian Rafah. A wall was built, which now separates them.

He tells MEE, “When I attempt to travel through the Rafah crossing, the officers often tell me that seeing my mother is not that important.”

But seeing his mother is very important to Aburtema, and he invests time and energy for even the smallest glimpse of her. It is increasingly difficult to meet at the fence, heavily guarded as it is by soldiers, guns and bulldozers. He could travel the short distance in minutes, but official border coordination, official paperwork and time-consuming Egyptian passenger terminals turn minutes into months.

This is the price he pays for being half Palestinian and half Egyptian by birth. He wonders if his life would be easier if he was one or the other.

Borders

“These borders awaken something so deep inside me,” he says when asked what the borders mean to him.

Ahmed was born in 1984, a couple of years after the wall between Gaza and Egypt was erected. At that precise time, his mother was visiting her parents on the Egyptian side of Rafah. Ever since, she has been unable to return, as the new wall has halted everyone's mobility. Ahmed was still in his mother’s womb when she travelled, and she gave birth to him in Egypt.

“I was three years old by the time I got back to Gaza,” he tells MEE. After that, the next time he was allowed to see his mother was 2005, when Israel began its disengagement from Gaza and moved its Jewish settlers out of the Strip.

It was an emotional and difficult moment for Ahmed to see his mother again when he was 21 years old. She was a person he only knew in photos or through distant shouts and greetings passed from behind heavily guarded security fences.

“Together with my two sisters, I was able to visit my relatives after 19 years - but it was a joy not quite fulfilled, as five days later we had to leave before the border shut.”

When the siege tightened in 2008, frustrated and desperate Palestinians broke through part of the wall between Egypt and Gaza. This was the second time Ahmed was able to see his mother.

“I was able to spend 10 whole days with her and I also got to know a young woman that I fell in love with,” he says.

Following in his father’s footsteps

Aburtema proposed to the girl he met, who is now his wife.

He admits, however, that bringing his wife back was a nearly impossible mission - with her being an Egyptian national and all the restrictions on obtaining necessary documentation from her government to get into war-torn Gaza.

“We only overcame this obstacle by bringing my wife through the tunnels [between Egypt and Gaza],” says Aburtema.

As the red glow of the sunset reflects in his eyes, he says he is happy his wife was willing to travel through the tunnels after seven long months of waiting for paperwork.

Although his wife may only be a few short miles from her people and family in Egypt, in practice, those miles separate them in a very real and seemingly permanent manner.

"The only difference between us is that she is Egyptian and I am Palestinian,” Aburtema says, despite the fact that both he and his wife were born in the same city in Egypt. The sad irony is that his wife can’t be with her relatives in Egypt, and Ahmed cannot be with his mother.

The couple, along with their two children in Gaza, survive in a state of alienation from their extended families. Aburtema studied in Gaza City and is becoming one of the most daring young preachers in the area. However, his speeches are often criticised by Islamists as not being strict enough, and over the years he has attracted complaints that he minimises the meaning of Islam. However he continues to raise thought-provoking questions about the practices and misdeeds of people who deliberately misinterpret the Quran and is gaining a solid support base from moderate Muslims who appreciate his intellect.

Memories of tunnels

As Ahmed sits watching the border and as the sun disappears below the horizon over a blue Mediterranean, he says there are no more tunnels to transport him to his family. For years, the tunnels were the only practical way he could hope to connect to his mother.

“I could call my mom from the Gaza side and ask her to make a cup of tea for me. By the time I would get there, the tea would be ready for me,” he says with a wide smile.

As he looks around, he recalls the first row of houses that belonged to his aunts and cousins. All of those homes are gone now, destroyed by Egyptian troops clearing the way for a 500-metre buffer zone, in an attempt to combat tunnel activity.   

“Now I sit on the Rafah border, with Israeli walls and fences to the north and east, reflecting on those memories, and how people we love are just over a wall in the south now, on the Egyptian side.”

A bird flies by as he stands on the hill, chirping as he floats on the breeze. Ahmed pauses and muses on how much he loves the sea, the sunset and the singing birds.

“I get jealous of the birds which can fly over, between my mother’s house and mine, without being trapped by borders. I wish I was as free as that bird,” he says.