A Berkshire County woman has personal ties to a fundraising effort to help a Palestinian family trapped in the Southern Gaza city Rafah evacuate to neighboring Egypt. Lillian Volat of Great Barrington, Massachusetts is promoting a $67,000 effort to help her friend Aya Al-Ghazzawi and her 14-member family escape the Israeli military campaign that has killed around 35,000 since the October 7th Hamas attacks. Volat, who has worked to organize Pro-Palestinian demonstrations through the Anti-Imperialist Solidarity group, knows Al-Ghazzawi through her time working with the International Centre for Water Management Services in the Middle East. She spoke with WAMC.
VOLAT: Aya and her family had to escape from the north where they were living and move to Rafah. So, they did make that journey. It was a very challenging journey for them, and they're living now in a tent in Rafah, and struggling to meet their basic needs. They can barely find internet, so it’s basically waiting a day or two, just to hear back from her making sure she's still alive, that they have food and water that they're spending their time trying to find every day. And recently, we had some really bad news that her cousin had tried to go back to the north to find his mom and siblings who had to stay there, and he was murdered by a quadcopter on his way back to check on them. And currently, Aya is scared because there's an imminent invasion planned to happen in Rafah and they've been bombing Rafah pretty frequently, so she's thinking of moving her family back to middle of Gaza. However, [with] what just happened with her cousin Mohammed, she's terrified now to move but also doesn't want to stay. She's been sending us messages that they're trying to evacuate women and children from Rafah and leaving the men, and she's scared that the men that get left would just get obliterated there, so she doesn't want to leave those members of her- She doesn't want to leave Rafah for that reason, but at the same time… Yeah, so they're in a, just an incredibly difficult and challenging situation and we're doing our best to get them on the list with the Egyptian immigration authority so that we can evacuate them into Egypt.
WAMC: Now, how much money are you trying to fundraise? And what are you hoping that those resources will do for your friend and her family?
So currently, it costs $5,000 per adult to evacuate from coordination fees from the Egyptian side. So, we're trying to fundraise $67,000 to evacuate all the members of her family with her. It's a very high target, but the decision she would have to make if we don't reach that is who she's going to leave there, and who she's going to take with her. So, we're really trying our efforts to do as much as we can to make sure she doesn't have to make that decision.
What do you know about the folks in this extended family? Of those 14 or so folks, do you know anything about who they are or where they are in life? Or just any detail?
So, she's there with her mother and her sisters, and she has her nieces with her who are younger. She's sending us stories about her brother who was a dentist, and had saved up for many, many years to open his clinic, and how the family has helped save their money as well to open the clinic, and he had literally just bought the last machine for his clinic when it was destroyed in an airstrike. His name is Mahmoud, and now he's left with nothing, essentially, after he built up for years trying to- He's a younger man, and he has a family as well, and so now he's kind of destitute in this situation. One of her sisters is named Arij, and she was a teacher and assistant at the university- She was planning to be a teacher's assistant studying at the university and the university was destroyed, and she was planning to graduate but has not, cannot graduate now. And she has younger siblings who are expressing that they just want to have a childhood and be safe, but that they can't really be children. She also has another 18-year-old sister who lost her ability to go to school, as all the schools in her town were destroyed. Her brother's Saad, for example, is a father of three, three girls, and he's just struggling to keep them safe and alive. Their names are Tala and Sarra and they were really, really good students, and they wanted to be doctors in the future, but because of what's going on with the genocide, they don't see that future for themselves anymore. So, those are some of her family members and their dreams that they had that we've gotten to meet over the past six months as we're helping fundraise to evacuate them to safety.
Lastly, have they tried to communicate any message to the wider world from their experience? Is there anything you'd like to pass forward from them to the WAMC listenership from their experience and what they're trying to do right now?
Aya has actually written an article that was published in Amnesty International about what they're experiencing and I encourage everybody to go check Amnesty International for her article. You can find her article there where she does a very lovely, detailed – well, well written, I should say – and detailed account of what the situation is that they're facing and how they're managing it and coping with it. I don't want to kind of butcher her words there, because it's so eloquently written. Aya herself is a writer and a teacher. She's a secondary school teacher, and she's written previously a lot prior to this, this genocide. She's been writing a lot about her experience in Gaza, and you can find her published online in various different outlets.
