On conveyor belt 43, the first bags pass before the gates open a few minutes later. The grandfather who appears to the crowd barely takes two steps when his grandchildren rush into his arms. His wife, with misty eyes, cannot speak: “There’s too much going on in my head.”, she puts it simply. And here are families hugging each other in tears, friends greeting each other with big smiles, a dog barking happy to find its master.
Terminal 2E of Charles-de-Gaulle airport was the scene of scenes of joy and reunions on Thursday, October 12 evening, after the landing of the first Air France flight repatriating French nationals from Israel. 377 people disembarked around 9 p.m., far from the bloody conflict which has left more than 1,200 dead in Israel and more than 1,500 in Gaza since October 7. It was mostly people “vulnerable”elderly and children.
The end of a long wait for the relatives of the returnees who came to welcome them at the airport. Ezra (the people mentioned by their first name requested anonymity) watches for the arrival of his daughter in the flow of ghosts. “ She was on vacation in Netanya [au nord de Tel-Aviv] for the parties. She was quite safe but we were afraid that Hezbollah would also get involved. The sooner she got home, the better. », summarizes his father. Pregnant and mother of a 2-year-old little girl, the thirty-year-old was able to return with her husband. The latter left his parents and his sister behind, as they were not priority for these first flights.
The anxiety was also palpable among Jeannine and Pascal, both in their fifties, eager to see their 28-year-old son, back with his wife and their two children. “ It was very complicated during the first attacks because it was Shabbat so we didn’t have access to the telephone. We couldn’t contact our sonsays Pascal. We only realized he was alive afterwards. » A close friend of Jeannine lost her 23-year-old son, Franco-Israeli, who had volunteered to defend a kibbutz.
Relief and “guilt”
Their son Mendy arrives a few minutes later. He learned Thursday morning that he had his place on the Air France plane. “It was vague, the embassy was giving us contradictory information. There were tickets available with El Al [compagnie aérienne israélienne] but at 400 dollars minimum so we were stuck », he confides. At her feet, her little boy seems agitated. “He was scared because of the sirens. The other night he cried so much he lost his voice.”, says his father. At the terminal, medical teams from the Red Cross and SAMU were present, in particular to offer psychological care to all returnees.
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