BUCHAREST -- As Romania continues its diplomatic push for Israeli and Egyptian help evacuating hundreds of its citizens and their families from besieged Gaza, appeals for repatriation by those trapped or with relatives in the war zone have become increasingly desperate.
The Foreign Ministry confirmed this week that 260 Romanian nationals who are still in the blockaded Palestinian exclave more than two weeks after the outbreak of war have asked to be evacuated, with no breakthrough in sight to open Gaza's border with Egypt to civilian evacuees.
"Please, with all my heart, please," a Gaza-born doctor with permanent residency in Romania pleaded from near the Egyptian border on October 23. "Foreign Ministry, please! The president of Romania, Mr. [Klaus] Iohannis, please! Mr. Prime Minister [Marcel Ciolacu], please! Foreign Minister [Luminita Odobescu], I'm begging you with all my heart: See what you can do for us."
We are people of medicine. We are people who want to live. We want peace. We are not interested in any politics, neither theirs nor ours."
The doctor -- who agreed to speak to RFE/RL's Romanian Service but asked to remain anonymous -- and his Romanian wife and two of their three children were in Gaza City when Hamas gunmen launched their brutal incursion into southern Israel on October 7, targeting civilians and sparking an Israeli declaration of war. Since then, Israel has hit Gaza with heavy artillery and air strikes, allowing only limited deliveries of food, medicine, and water into the territory.
He and his Romanian wife, who is also a doctor, first spoke to RFE/RL on October 12. They own a home in Gaza where they travel frequently to visit relatives.
This week, after nearly two weeks on the move amid Israeli bombings and warnings to flee south before an imminent invasion by land, sea, and air, the doctor and his family are stuck in deplorable conditions in a shelter near the border with Egypt.
"I don't care who beats whom, who bombed, who shot whom," the doctor said on October 23 via WhatsApp, writing in the Romanian language he learned for medical school and has polished in the decades since. "We are people of medicine. We are people who want to live. We want peace. We are not interested in any politics, neither theirs nor ours."
His wife's voice echoes his urgency, saying theirs is "a call, a desperate call, a desperate humanitarian call to evacuate us," adding, "Please, we ask very kindly."
They described the horror of nightly bombardments, life without water or electricity, and sending their daughters out for hours to get bread because the lines for girls are faster than for men and boys.
Palestinians wait to buy bread outside a bakery in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 14.
The United Nations says more than half of Gaza's 2.3 million residents are internally displaced and 600,000 Palestinians are sheltering at around 150 UN-related sites in Gaza. It has urged an immediate cease-fire to allow for humanitarian aid deliveries. The UN's agency for Palestinian refugees warned on October 25 that it will have to dramatically reduce already curbed relief operations unless there are immediate deliveries of fuel to run generators at hospitals and carry out other essential functions.
Only a tiny trickle of emergency humanitarian aid -- but no fuel -- has been allowed across the border from Egypt since the current crisis erupted.
More than 1,400 people have died in Israel, most of them civilians deliberately targeted in the October 7 attack by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that has called for Israel's destruction and is headquartered in Gaza City. More than 200 more Israelis and other nationals are reportedly still being held hostage in Gaza since the early hours of the incursion.
All my family, including mine and my wife's, are in Gaza, where they are living among the rubble…. It's a disaster what's happening in Palestine and Gaza right now."
The Hamas-run Health Ministry has said more than 5,700 Palestinians have died since the fighting began, although that number could not be confirmed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared "war" on Hamas within hours of the incursion and vowed to inflict an "unprecedented price."
Thousands of Romanian nationals have fled Israel via commercial flights, but Gaza under Israeli siege presents greater obstacles.
A spokesman for Romania's Foreign Ministry, Radu Filip, told RFE/RL's Romanian Service on October 23 that the state was making "every diplomatic effort to resolve the situation of the 260 Romanians [and family members] who requested evacuation from Gaza."
"The [ministry], through the diplomatic missions in Cairo and Tel Aviv, continues dialogue with the Israeli and Egyptian authorities in order to ensure the necessary conditions for the evacuation of Romanian citizens from the Gaza Strip who requested this from the Representation Office of Romania in Ramallah," Filip said.
Communist-era Romania was among the first countries to recognize the Palestinian Authority in 1988, and thousands of Palestinian nationals have since been educated there, including many who settled and started families.
In addition to Romanian passport holders in Gaza, the Romanian Foreign Ministry's diplomatic representation office in Ramallah -- Palestine's de facto administrative capital -- says there are around 700 Palestinian graduates of Romanian universities among the "Romanian" community in the Palestinian territories, which include Gaza and the West Bank.
Nahedd Saba is another Gaza-born physician deeply concerned over events in his place of birth, although he's been in Romania for 43 years and has Romanian citizenship. Now he's a primary-care specialist at the Spitalul Clinic Gheorghe Polizu, a maternity health-care facility in Bucharest, and has remained active in a local association for Palestinian physicians and pharmacists.
His wife is also of Palestinian descent and, he said, "all my family, including mine and my wife's, are in Gaza, where they are living among the rubble…. It's a disaster what's happening in Palestine and Gaza right now."
A woman reacts at the Greek Orthodox St. Porphyrius Church in Gaza City, which was damaged by an Israeli air strike on October 20.
Speaking on October 22, Saba told RFE/RL's Romanian Service that he lost 13 family members to the current conflict after they sought refuge in the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius in Gaza City, which the Israeli military acknowledged damaging in an air strike on October 20. Saba's claims about the death of his family members could not be confirmed by RFE/RL.
He noted that around 350 fellow Palestinians had graduated in his medical class and said that he has stayed in touch with many of them. The Bucharest-based doctor said he'd spoken with an orthopedist friend from Gaza who described fleeing his home and simply "running from one place to another." He quoted the friend as saying, "We're running away, but I don't know exactly where."
But Saba, who has lived his whole life in Romania, said he did not expect that Palestinians who had already fled in significant numbers as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967 were likely to leave en masse again.
"This thought of taking refuge [abroad] once again doesn't exist in the population," Saba speculated. "They left twice so far…. The third refuge [is] harder. Look for areas that are, let's say, less bombed. But there is no less-bombed area."