This Wednesday at the beginning of April, Maryam decided not to send her three sons to school. This Palestinian from Gaza, evacuated to France with her husband in November 2023, must spend her day cleaning the apartment that they recovered the day before, in a town in the southwest of France. “On Wednesdays, the boys only have classes in the morning. It takes me a total of four hours on the bus to drop them off at school and bring them back. So I asked their teacher to allow them to be absent today”says the 42-year-old woman, who prefers to use an assumed first name, like the other Gazans cited in this article.
Maryam’s three sons, triplets aged just over 6, are in their pajamas and playing an online karate game on their tablet, while their mother opens boxes. Sami, her Franco-Palestinian husband, smokes cigarettes, while a technician installs the Internet and connects the television. “If there is Gulli, we will be at peaceslips Sami, 55 years olds. Since their arrival in France, the children have gotten into the habit of watching cartoons on the channel. »
The night from Tuesday to Wednesday was the first that this family spent in this apartment, on the fourth floor of a residence. Before, for almost five months, Sami and his family were housed in an apartment hotel, far from the city center. Sami, who has both legs amputated at the knees due to a rare genetic disease, and who has been walking for years thanks to prostheses, suffered a lot in this former home: “To accompany the children, I had to walk uphill, for around ten minutes, to the bus stop. And when it rained, the ground became slippery and it was even more difficult for me. In addition, my prostheses are damaged,” he explains. To change them, Sami waits to obtain his Vitale card and the inclusion mobility card – granted to people with disabilities or the elderly and losing their autonomy – which are slow to arrive.
This son of peasants expropriated from their farm, near Ashkelon (north of the Gaza Strip), during the creation of Israel in 1948, who testified in The world shortly after his evacuation from Gaza, studied in France in 1987 and completed his postgraduate degree at the Sorbonne. After various missions as a humanitarian worker in Africa, Jordan and Yemen, he returned to live and work in the Gaza Strip in 2010, on behalf of an NGO.
When the war broke out on October 7, 2023, with the Hamas attack on Israel and the Israeli response, Sami’s family, like many others, took refuge in the south of the Gaza Strip, in Khan Younes, then in Rafah, before being evacuated to Egypt and flying to France. Sami offered to settle with his family in the South-West, to be close to a nephew and a few friends. He continues to supervise, remotely, the activities of his NGO in Gaza.
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