When Amani Ahmed left Gaza for the UK to study, she never imagined being forcefully separated from her family for six months.
Nor did she foresee the anguish of going through a pregnancy alone while living more than 2,000 miles away from her husband and three children, as online footage of Israeli bombs raining down around her family home in Gaza City tormented her daily.
Just five days after Amani left to pursue a PhD in Edinburgh, Israel unleashed a bombing campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7 attacks, in which Israel said 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.
Israel has killed 48,219 Palestinians in its devastating response, the Gaza health ministry says. Every day, Amani counts herself lucky that her family were among the survivors – but in the months isolated from her family, life was unbearable.
“Will I be able to hug them again? Will I be able to see them and to calm them?” were among the relentless thoughts on her mind throughout an agonising six-month wait for her family’s evacuation.
“I had depression. I wasn’t able to wake up and do things, I was in a situation that is dangerous. I thought that I have to help myself,” she recalls of the terrifying months her family were trapped in the war-torn enclave.
“I wasn’t there and I couldn’t do anything, I found myself helpless. I really don’t wish any mother to have such an experience.”
Amani was assisted out of Gaza by the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara) days before the war broke out in October 2023. Within days, the area around Amani’s family home was demolished, as her two teenage daughters and eight-year-old son, now nine, hid from a barrage of Israeli attacks.
Having expected something similar to previous bombardments, panic began to set in as Amani’s family explained that this war was “different, it’s so aggressive this time, and so violent”.
Six months later, and despite logistical difficulties, Amani’s family were evacuated. Her two daughters, 16-year-old Hala and 14-year-old Nada, were brought to the UK by the UK embassy. Her 42-year-old husband, Salah, and son, Ayham, were evacuated via the Hala organisation, a private Egyptian company that coordinates the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza.
“I wanted to hug them all together. I wasn’t sure how to hug everyone, my hands were so small to hug all them all together at the same time,” she said of the moment she first saw them in a hotel in Egypt last April. “I had that feeling of opening my chest and just putting them inside.”
Weathered by war and overwhelmed by trauma, Amani saw physical change in her three eldest children. They had lost weight, with darkened skin and dark circles under their eyes, she recalled.
“They are going from hell to heaven,” she explained. “I couldn’t imagine that one day I would be seeing my children surprised with seeing food in the market in Egypt. But this is the situation, because there is nothing in Gaza.”
With a ceasefire now in place following 15 months of war between Israel and Hamas, and with her family safely by her side – including seven-month-old Adam who was born in Scotland in June last year – Amani hopes to return to Gaza once her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where she is researching female entrepreneurs in the occupied West Bank, is complete.
But a sense of dread underlines her desire to return.
“People are telling me that the situation is unimaginable,” Amani said. “People are saying it’s more than rubble. What is happening is not only killing, not only destroying infrastructure. It’s inside every Palestinian who is living in Gaza, in their heart, in their feeling, in their minds.
“They have hope, but something inside is destroyed. And I’m not sure if it can be healed or not.”
While a future in Gaza remains uncertain, settling into the UK has been by no means been easy. Hala, who is studying for her highers (the Scottish version of GCSEs), was one of the top students in her class in Gaza. She now faces an uphill battle in her desire to study medicine.
She is “suffering a lot”, Amani said, with the UK education system not looking at her children as war survivors and instead treating them as typical international students. “Nothing is being provided to help,” Amani added.
At home in Gaza, Palestinians are being allowed to return to the north of the enclave this week as they look to rebuild their lives among the wreckage. Amani’s house in Gaza City is one of the hundreds of thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged by Israeli forces.
“It’s destroyed totally, there is nothing left,” she said. “Me and my husband worked too hard to have this house. It’s the only thing we owned. The meaning of a house is beyond infrastructure; it’s an achievement, it’s home.
“I really feel this deep pain of seeing all this reconstruction and destruction, reconstruction and destruction.
“It’s not a life to have this kind of escalation every two to three years. This is not a life, this is not dignity for people.”
