Out of Gaza, they’re finding their way in Australia
More than 1700 Palestinians have arrived in Australia from Gaza since the war began. As the chances of peace improve, they talk about their lives here – and their hopes for the future.
Samer Tarazi looks exhausted. He has been in Australia for just one week, reunited with his wife and three children after 18 months apart. For the Palestinian journalist his exit from Gaza is a cause for joy, but also immense sadness.
Through an interpreter, the 43-year-old says the “inch-by-inch” incursion of the Israel Defence Forces had left him no choice.
“When I received the news I could leave, it was a relief, because I knew that once the Israelis reach Gaza City, it will be the complete destruction of the city,” he says. “I was forced to leave because they have not left anything standing.”
Tarazi is speaking to The Australian some days before Hamas signalled it would release hostages – a move that offers hope that the two-year-long war, which he covered for international and Arabic news agencies, may finally end.
In Sydney, he has joined parents who have lived here for many years and are Australian citizens. The Tarazi family are well known in the tiny Christian community in Gaza City where Christians comprise about 1 per cent of the population. Tarazi is among more than 1700 Gazans, plus some from the West Bank, who have arrived since the war began, with the latest group landing on September 19.
They have been supported with accommodation and food by NGOs, churches and Muslim community organisations. Most are now on short-term or three-year protection visas, some 30 per cent are understood to have permanent residency. Most of those permitted to work are said to be employed, their children have spent months in intensive English language courses and are finding their way in regular schools.
Their stories vary but a common thread is relatives who arrived here before the war, many of them Australian citizens, who have in effect sponsored family members. Many families paid $US5000 ($7574) per person to exit into Egypt at the Raffa border – a system that ended after Israel took control of the crossing six months into the war.
Some of the newcomers are wary of being identified, anxious Hamas will target family in Gaza, anxious too that any comments they make about the war will impact on their visas.
Tarazi is willing to tell his story – and to defend the Palestinian journalists who reported the war even as many were killed and others were accused of working for Hamas or other militant groups.
“Journalists are reporting the truth as they see it, they see all the killings and what’s happening to people, and they’re reporting exactly what they are seeing,” he says. “They are eye witnesses.”
Tarazi had planned to leave Gaza City with his family in early 2024 but problems with his visa kept him sheltering at the Greek Orthodox St Porphyrius Church, which along with the Holy Family Catholic Church was home for more than 1000 Christians after October 7. About 400 have been evacuated since then.
Tarazi left the church every morning to video the destruction, sending footage to agencies including the BBC and CNN. Before the conflict, he was managing director of a media agency and worked at Palestine National Television. He says many journalists were targeted and killed in their homes by the IDF. In April last year he was taken into custody by the IDF at the Al-Shifa hospital and held for 17 hours before he was released, wearing only his boxers.
He fears return is impossible: “There’s no hope, there’s no infrastructure, no electricity, no life. They have destroyed everything. There’s not enough food … it’s been made uninhabitable.”
At a backyard gathering of mainly Muslim Palestinians in Sydney’s Banksia, The Australian meets another journalist – one who is now working for the NSW public service and prefers anonymity.
At 38, he has been here for 18 months and his English, perfected through his work as a news producer and fixer in Gaza, has helped him find good work – albeit after making “hundreds of applications”.
He is still triggered by talk of the conflict and says: “I feel I am extremely lucky to be here but there’s survival guilt as well. I would love to go back to Gaza but basically there’s no place to go back to at the moment – the (destruction) of the whole of Gaza is beyond comprehension.”
There are about 50 people at the September 27 gathering organised by the volunteer-based Gaza Australian Program led by Dr Mahmoud Kaskeen, an engineer who migrated here in 2017. Some of the guests have been here since early last year, others arrived with the September 19 group met at Sydney Airport by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke.
Kaskeen says that while most of those given support by his organisation are Muslim, he has also assisted Christian Palestinians here. He says Gazans in Australia want nothing more than peace and an end to the killing
“While we live in safety here, we cannot feel at ease knowing our loved ones back home are suffering every day,” he says. “Still, we remain hopeful that a genuine peace plan will stop the violence and allow our families to live with dignity and security
He says many Australian families with roots in Gaza are carrying the financial burden of supporting their loved ones just so they can survive. “This impact can be felt in every Australian household that has family in Gaza,” he says.
That impact is felt by one of the guests, 22-year-old Mohammed Abu Arqoup, who arrived on Valentine’s Day last year. He works as a chef at Plate It Forward – a social enterprise that runs five restaurants in Sydney. He spent a couple of months in a TAFE English language course but says he has learnt more English in the workplace – even though there are people from 15 different countries in his kitchen. Now he is focused on getting his parents and four siblings out of Gaza. He regularly sends money back but worries it is nowhere near enough, given a kilo of flour can cost $300.
The day we talk he had sent $5000 to family to help them move to the centre of the Gaza Strip. He pulls out his phone to show a photo of his brother in hospital with a shrapnel wound to his chest.
Remitting funds back to Gaza is common – and often the only way family trapped in the war have been able to buy food on the black market. But the process is fraught, with brokers taking up to 50 per cent as a commission.
Mahmoud Kaskeen’s sister, Dr Mona Kaskeen and her husband, Khalil, and their four children paid $US30,000 to get into Egypt early in 2024, and a month later arrived in Australia. Dr Mona Kaskeen is a neurosurgeon and has become an advocate for the community here.
She tells The Australian that while she has sent papers to be verified as part of the process to register as a doctor, she has lost some motivation, in part, because she remains on a temporary visa.
Son Ibrahim, 12; twin girls Sana and Ghena 14, and daughter Wasan 17, are all doing well at their Kogarah schools. The family live at Arncliffe and Khalil, who worked in the finance department in Palestine before the war, is now working as a cleaner at Sydney University.
Born in Gaza, Mona Kaskeen says she has never known peace in her 52 years.
“When we came here, my plan was to stay here just for one or two months to visit my brother and go back when the war was over,” she says. “But we cannot go back – we lost our house, I lost my job. We hope we can return to Gaza, but not this time, not for a while.”
While Dr Kaskeen and her daughters spent time preparing kebabs and chicken for the Banksia crowd, Dr Saadou Khalaf told The Australian how he had escaped the war in its early days.
A dentist for 25 years with qualifications from Algeria, France and Egypt, he had his own specialist practice in Gaza City and worked with the health ministry and the University of Palestine.
He and wife Noor and their three sons, Sami, 18, Amro, 17, and Ahmad, 10, had a comfortable life in the city till October 8, 2023 – the day after the horrific attacks by Hamas and others on Israelis – when the Khalaf home was bombed. The family left immediately, spending the next few weeks moving “from suburb to suburb, city to city, trying to find shelter” before getting into Egypt.
Khalaf recalls: “I said to myself what do I do now? I was not planning to go outside Gaza, until I found myself comparing two things – staying in tents without any hope the war would be finished soon, or going outside Gaza and trying to find a better life, a safe haven.”
His brother was in Australia and by March 2024, the Khalafs too were in Sydney.
“We were one of the lucky ones even though I have lost everything – in a second,” he says. “It was the same for my brothers, my cousins, uncles – all our apartments, our houses have been destroyed.
“In Gaza now, no one is living a normal life … schools, hospitals are being erased … no one is working and no one is getting money.”
At first he thought he might be able to return to Gaza, but says: “To be honest, there is nothing to go back to. There’s nothing left, they’ve erased 80 per cent of the Gaza Strip and Gaza City.
“Most people are in tents on the street. I’m grateful to be in Australia, the country of peace, multiculturalism and opportunities.”
A week after we talk, as the Trump peace plan emerges, Khalaf expresses doubt that it can be the solution because “it denies our right to a state, our sovereignty, our right to self-determination”.
He lost the documents citing his dentistry qualifications when his house was bombed but has begun the laborious process of obtaining copies from various universities to allow him to work here as a dentist.
Meanwhile, he is a care facilitator at an aged-care provider and says: “I had two options – cry in the corner or face the reality and show the resilience and the strength and flexibility to continue.”
His sons are doing well at school, especially in physics, maths and, of course, Arabic but he says: “What is amazing is that the last exam of my eldest one in English in year 12 – it was 85 per cent.”
Susan Wahhab, president of the community group Palestinian Christians in Australia, estimates about one-third of those arriving since October 7 are Christians. Her group has helped house 70 Christian families from Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and 21 Muslim families from Gaza, in the Blacktown and Liverpool areas of Sydney.
Wahhab grew up in Ramallah before migrating to Sydney in the 1980s; her grandparents were refugees from the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. An accountant and financial strategist, she says many Christian Palestinians were involved in the wholesale gold and jewellery trade, and many had links with families in Australia that allowed them to come here.
As people arrived in the first few months, Wahhab’s group swung into action to organise accommodation and food, raising more than $700,000 from church supporters. After the Department of Home Affairs provided $477,000 in September last year, the group began supporting Muslim families.
Wahhab says most protection visa holders have jobs: “Some have come with master’s degrees, and have found work that might not be related to what they were doing (in Gaza) or on a lower level, but they’re standing on their feet, their English is good, they’ve integrated well into Australian society.”
She says many initially believed they could return to Gaza but “nobody anticipated that the war was going to last so long, and that everything would be destroyed. They all thought – we’re here on a visitor’s visa, when the war is over, we will go back. But it didn’t happen that way”.
“Some of them wish they could go back but a lot of them, all their houses and businesses have been destroyed, their gold shops have been destroyed or looted. Most who came were from middle or upper middle class, especially those with Christian backgrounds; they had land or still own land, but it’s been pillaged, the land, the houses.”
Wahhab says the pause in the fighting is welcome, but not enough. and there must be immediate aid and shelter delivered after two years of relentless attacks. Over the weekend, her organisation called for a guarantee of sovereignty for Palestinian people: “After 80 years and many generations of suffering, the people of Gaza cannot be asked to simply exchange one form of occupation for another.”
One person who has been assisted by Palestinian Christians in Australia is Melbourne logistics worker Tamar, who does not wish to give his surname. A single man, he was stuck in Cyprus (where he had been studying) when the war began but managed to get to Australia a few months later thanks to an uncle here. Nine months later, his parents and siblings arrived.
“I’d love to go back to Gaza,” he says. “But I don’t think there’s any chance.” His father ran a jewellery business back home and “we were happy”, even though Gaza before the war was “like a big jail”.
“The borders were always closed, you needed permission to travel,” he says, adding that as a minority in Gaza, Christian-run businesses were sometimes boycotted by Muslim traders.
At Mahmoud Kaskeen’s gathering, a son talks about his parents, who arrived a few days earlier, reluctantly leaving their children and grandchildren. A civil engineer, he is a permanent resident who has been here since 2017. His parents’ home in Gaza City was destroyed in August but he organised a car to take them to the middle of the strip at Al-Zawayda, while his siblings and their children walked there, cramming into two rooms. His parents still hope to return, but their son is doubtful.
“I don’t think my parents will go back,” he says. “I am in the construction business, that’s what I do, and I think it will take at least 20 years for Gaza to be rebuilt.”
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