With communications largely cut off to Gaza, Palestinians living in Türkiye are afraid of hearing “bad news” from their loved ones amid Israeli bombardment of the Palestinian enclave.
Ali Sukka, a 19-year-old Palestinian student at Gümüşhane University in the eponymous Black Sea province of Türkiye, said they were as worried about the “world’s silence” as Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Speaking to Ihlas News Agency (IHA), Sukka said he felt bad for what is happening in Gaza. “I don’t know why they are doing it and I don’t know why the world, the Arab world, is so quiet about Gaza. (Israel) kills everyone: babies, children and elderly people. If it happened elsewhere, the entire world would come to their aid,” he lamented.
Mohammad Kasem Mohd, another university student who attended a Turkish course before starting his formal education at Trabzon University, lost his loved ones, including cousins of his parents and his three friends. The 19-year-old youth says he is constantly checking Gaza and the West Bank developments. “We hear the news of martyrs and are depressed,” Mohd said.
“All my relatives are there. My home is there. Our house was a bit far from the city center, but I don’t know if it stands now,” Mohd, who has been unable to contact his family for days, said.
Mohd recalled an incident about Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians from 10 years ago. “I was leaving a grocery store in the West Bank. Suddenly, five buses drove to the street. Israeli soldiers jumped out and pointed their guns at me. They told me to walk to the other side. I was crying for my mother. They then started throwing tear gas at people on the street. I felt like I went blind. I lost sight of my left eye for a few months. It was my first encounter with Israeli soldiers and I was really scared,” he recounted.
Mohd worries about the lack of communication with his family and friends in Palestine. “We can sometimes send texts to each other and that’s it. They tell me they try to stay close so that they will not be separated (during an attack). I am scared of hearing bad news about them,” he said.
At Ankara University in the Turkish capital, the university administration hosted an event for Palestinian students, giving them a platform to voice their thoughts about the situation back home. Naser Alsalehi, a biomedical engineering student, recounted how a house next to his family’s home was bombed. “They hid this news from me at first. They were only talking about my life here. They were asking if I was OK. I have a brother who is a doctor there and he was injured. But he is still working at the hospital. This is how Palestinians are living there now,” he said.
Rachid Al Okka, a medical student at Ankara University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that he could not contact his family in Gaza for days. “I have parents and five siblings there, but I don’t know if they are alive or not. I am very worried because that hospital attack was close to our home,” he said, referring to this week’s Israeli strike at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, which killed hundreds. He says he has only a “list of martyrs” regularly updated by the Gaza Ministry of Health “to learn about the fate of my family.”
Zainab Hajjar, a law student at the university, said she heard that the houses of most of her relatives were bombed and they had nowhere to go. She said it was tough to communicate with them due to power outages. “I am studying law, but it seems meaningless to me now. The international law means nothing while this is happening,” she said, referring to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks against Palestinians.
Abdullah Abu Jassir lost 17 people in Israel’s attacks, including his family members and neighbors. As he attended a funeral prayer in absentia for Palestinians earlier this week in the province of Kütahya, where he attends university, he was surrounded by locals offering him condolences. “My brother and sister and their children, their neighbors were all in one house they thought would be safe. An Israeli bomb martyred them. Israel knew there were civilians there, but they flattened that building and killed my family,” he told Anadolu Agency (AA).
Nasreen Isaa’s fate is tangled with conflicts and now she fears losing her relatives in Gaza. A 35-year-old Palestinian woman who lives in the capital, Ankara, lost her husband Adnan during the civil war in Syria, where she settled 25 years ago with her parents after fleeing Israel’s oppression. The mother of three took shelter in Türkiye after her husband’s death.
Isaa fears for the lives of her aunt and two uncles in Palestine now. She had not heard them for days.
Isaa recounts how members of her family were beaten by Israeli soldiers who raided their home in Palestine when she was a young girl. “One of my uncles was detained and we did not hear from him again. It was a difficult time and we were impoverished. So, we migrated to Syria,” she told Demirören News Agency (DHA).
She left her “memories and everything in Syria” after her husband was killed in Idlib and fled into Türkiye but now faces the prospect of loss of surviving relatives. “They have no phone connection, internet connection. I could not reach them yet. I can only pray to Allah for their wellbeing,” she said.
