Citizens of Türkiye and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) continued evacuating from Gaza on Wednesday amid Israel’s bombardment of the Palestinian enclave.
In an operation conducted in collaboration with the Turkish Foreign Ministry and the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), a group of 100 people, including some with disabilities, the elderly, women and children who had entered Egypt via the Rafah border crossing, were brought to Istanbul Airport on a Turkish Airlines flight from Cairo.
Officials from the Foreign Ministry and the AFAD welcomed them at the airport.
The evacuees were treated to tea and cookies at the VIP terminal.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency (AA), one of the evacuees, Abdullah Coşkun, expressed his happiness at reaching Türkiye.
“Thank God I have reunited with my family. Our journey from there to here was very difficult,” said Coşkun, who thought he would not be able to see his family again due to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks.
Another evacuee, Abir Sahmud, recounted the painful experience they had endured for 45 days.
“The firing and bombing never stopped. We waited long for the world to hear us, but no one did.”
He thanked Türkiye and added: “All my friends in Türkiye wrote to me every day, every night, asking ‘Are you alive?’”
Minna Sahmud, a 10-year-old who arrived in a wheelchair, described the difficulties they faced.
“We were mixing water with sugar to drink. Finding food was very difficult. We thank Türkiye and our President (Recep Tayyip) Erdoğan for coming here.”
Sahmud requested prayers for the children in Palestine.
Maria Sahmud, a 12-year-old passenger, drew attention to the millions of Palestinians waiting to be rescued, saying, “We couldn’t find (even) food and water.”
After passport control, some evacuees left the airport on their own, while TRNC citizens and those residing in other cities were taken to hotels by buses provided by the AFAD.
With the organized evacuation operations, approximately 350 Turkish and TRNC citizens have been brought back so far, and evacuations from Gaza will continue.
Ankara has sent some 700 tonnes of humanitarian aid, medical supplies, medicine and medical personnel to Egypt for Gazans. It has said that it wants to set up a field hospital on the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing.
On Monday, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said he had spoken by phone to his Egyptian and Israeli counterparts to discuss conducting fieldwork inside a “safe zone” in Gaza to find an appropriate location for the field hospital to be set up, adding his counterparts had voiced an openness to coordinating on it and on evacuating children and babies.
Koca said last week that Ankara wanted to bring back as many as possible of the nearly 1,000 cancer patients from Gaza – most of whom are former patients of a Turkish-Palestinian hospital that shut down because of Israeli attacks. The first 27 patients arrived in Ankara last Thursday. He said on Monday that 150 Gazans had been brought to Türkiye. Most of the patients are cancer patients and eight of the 61 patients who arrived on Monday were in “slightly more serious condition.”
