Palestinian Samir El-Barawy and his Bosnian bride, Samir, fled to Gaza to escape fighting in Yugoslavia over three decades ago. However, their return to Bosnia was marked by a dramatic change in fortunes for their family. The couple, along with their infant daughter Dalila, fled Sarajevo as war threatened to overrun Bosnia, following an outbreak in fighting first in Slovenia and then later Croatia.
Despite perennial bouts of fighting amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the family prospered in Gaza, running a strawberry plantation just „500 meters from the Israeli border” and exporting thousands of tonnes of fruit annually, including to European markets. However, El-Barawy admits that their life in Gaza was now gone forever, and they decided never to go back there again.
To date, 37 people have arrived in Bosnia from Gaza, as part of a tiny trickle of foreign nationals and medical evacuees who have made it out of Gaza since war erupted. Ahmed Shahin, a paediatrician who studied medicine in Bosnia in the 1990s, hopes to return to Gaza and his home in Jabaliya once the war ends. He was granted citizenship that paved the way for his evacuation from Gaza years later.
During the early days of the war in Gaza, he volunteered at an Indonesia hospital in the territory’s hard-hit north, where supplies began to run low almost immediately. As the war ground on, „the influx of corpses and wounded intensified,” he said.
Along with his wife, their three daughters, and teenage son, they fled south leaving behind the grave of another son who was killed by an air strike during an earlier conflict in 2014. „The world is watching live the destruction of buildings full of children and women, watching the blood being spilt while it is still warm. And it does nothing,” Shahin said through tears.
In recent decades, a significant number of Palestinian migrants have sought refuge in Europe, escaping conflict and seeking better opportunities. The majority of Palestinian migrants have sought refuge in countries like Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
