On Tuesday night, Isam Hammad slept in a bed for the first time in more than five months. “I usually wake up very early in the morning but today I slept until 11am, I just kept sleeping.”
He is speaking less than 24 hours after Isam, and his 19-year-old son Ezzideen, landed in Dublin Airport where they were reunited with the rest of the Hammad family who arrived here in late February.
The family fled their home in Gaza city and travelled to Rafah in October, a fortnight after the Hamas-led assault in southern Israel and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
In November 2023, Isam applied for Irish visas through his son Hamza, who was born in the Coombe Hospital in Dublin in 1997 and has Irish citizenship. Hamza, who has cerebral palsy, spent four months in a cramped room, which he shared with 11 other men in an apartment block in Rafah, before he left Gaza in February.
His mother Huda, his sister Razan (24) and his two younger brothers Shams (13) and Alam (17) also managed to leave after consular representatives from the Irish Embassy in Cairo secured Irish visas and permission for the family to cross the border into Egypt. Isam, who also secured a visa and crossed the border, refused to leave for Ireland until Ezzideen was granted permission to exit the besieged strip.
“I was terrified for his fate and the threat on his life,” says Isam. “In Gaza there are missiles being shot at buildings with civilians and everybody in that building is either killed or injured. And you have no explanation why it’s happening.”
Isam spent more than three weeks liaising with Irish Government officials in Cairo and lobbying for Ezzideen, who was not eligible for a visa under family reunification because he is aged over 18, to join his family. “I explained the role Ezzideen had in taking care of Hamza, particularly over the four months in Rafah. He would lift him up [from the mattress] several times a day to bring him to the toilet, to sit him up to eat.”
Eventually, last Thursday, Ezzideen’s visa was granted and Isam paid the $5,000 (€4,600) co-ordination fee to an Egyptian broker so his son could cross the border and collect his permission to travel to Ireland. This fee, which he also paid to secure his own exit, is given to border agents to ensure names make it on to the daily list of people permitted to leave Gaza, says Isam.
The family are now staying in State-provided accommodation in Dublin 1, having spent their initial weeks in homeless accommodation near the Phoenix Park. As they are not international protection applicants, and came here through family reunification, they were registered as homeless upon arrival in Dublin. Isam is conscious that his family is cramped and uncomfortable in the two-bedroom apartment, which is also unsuitable for Hamza to move around. However, he underlines his “relief” to finally be in Ireland.
“I lived in Ireland for eight years so I’m not feeling that I’m going to a strange place, I’m going to a place which I know very well. There’s no place like home, we all understand this, but Ireland is our home now when everything else is gone.
“We have been living in a disaster, a catastrophe. So I’m really happy to be here and grateful to everybody who helped with our situation.
“What we have seen is something beyond imagination. Never, ever could I expect that there are human beings who can commit these atrocities, this is something beyond imagination. Making it here to Ireland, it’s a miracle.”
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