‘It’s like coming back from the grave’: Palestinian family divided between Israel and Gaza finally reunited
The last time Mais al-Gharam saw her seven siblings was in the Gaza Strip two months before the war. That was before she left the Palestinian territory to go live in Israel and before an Israeli airstrike on the family’s home killed her parents and younger brother.
But on this day, she waited hopefully outside Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, scanning for a glimpse of her surviving brothers and sisters as they made their way through the gates and out of Gaza.
“We never stopped being a family,” said Mais, who is 23 and the eldest of eight siblings born to a father from Gaza and a mother who was a Palestinian citizen of Israel. “But every day I wondered whether I’d see them again.”
The family finally reunited this month following a yearslong effort by Mais and a team of lawyers to get her brothers and sisters out. They met outside the border crossing and then drove together to the city of Nazareth, where their mother’s extended family showered the siblings with hugs and homemade food.
The reunion carried joy, grief and a quiet disbelief: Despite the odds, Mais had secured Israeli passports for her Gaza-born siblings, ages 8 to 22, and arranged for them to come live with her.
But while they had found one another again, they could never reclaim what they lost.
“It’s like coming back from the grave,” Faraj al-Gharam, their maternal grandfather, said of his grandchildren. In Gaza, he said, “human life has no value.”
The family’s story begins in 2002 when Murad al-Gharam, a native of Gaza, was working construction in Israel on a temporary job permit. There, he met and married Amal Karim, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who lived in Nazareth. Soon, they had a baby girl and named her Mais.
Decades ago, such marriages were common between Palestinians who lived in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, before two Palestinian uprisings and Israel’s response closed off the occupied territories.
When Murad and Amal met, it was at the height of the Second Intifada. As violence raged, Israel clamped down on work permits for Palestinians, putting Murad’s status in Israel in jeopardy.
He and Amal moved to Gaza permanently, settling down with Mais in Nuseirat, a built-up refugee camp in the enclave’s central region. Murad began work as a taxi driver, and the couple had seven more children — Zuhour, 22; Jwaher, 21; Sabreen, 20; Ghfran, 17, Fady, 16; Maisara, 11; and Arjwan, 8.
“We lived here together as a family … and never lacked anything,” Zuhour said.
On Oct. 7, 2023, everything changed.
When Hamas-led militants from Gaza attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage, the al-Gharams were one of what rights groups estimated to be more than 300 “divided families” with members on both sides of the border.
