LAST UPDATE | 3 May

AN IRISH-PALESTINIAN man who was trapped in Gaza for months has said he is “delighted” to be returning to Ireland, but expressed deep sadness at the ongoing war there.

Zak Hania is currently in Cairo after he was allowed to leave war-torn Gaza. He had been in Rafah for five months, after his wife Batoul and four sons were allowed to leave in November.

Zak’s departure was blocked however, and Batoul campaigned for him to be allowed to leave the country. 

Speaking this afternoon to RTÉ’s News at One, Zak said he was happy to alive and to be able to return to Ireland but had “mixed feelings”.

“To be honest I have mixed feelings,” he said.

“I’m not really sure how really I can feel. It’s a hard experience for the last 7 months and I went through a lot things.

“I’m delighted. I thank God that I survived, I really can’t believe that I am safe now and I survived this but it’s a tough experience, very very tough. Especially because I left a lot of loved ones behind and that’s a hard thing to go through.

But I’m looking forward to go to Dublin and see my family and my friends and go back to my beloved country, Ireland.

Zak also described the conditions in Rafah:

It’s beyond imagination. In the last seven months we lived constantly under the noise and sounds of drones, fighter jets, bombardment, artillery and shells those sounds are constant 24 hours,” he said.

“Can you imagine for living seven months under all this fear and terror you’re just hearing the bombs and you don’t know where the target is… and living this for seven months, it’s something very, very difficult and very tough.

And it’s a very hard to experience. I don’t wish anybody to live in these conditions.

He said people struggled to find water to wash and to drink and that he still feared for his sisters and the rest of his extended family in Gaza.

Speaking to TheJournal today, Zak’s wife Batoul said she was excited to be reunited with her husband, but that the happiness was mixed with grief for the ongoing crisis in Gaza.

“Of course I feel excited. It’s a long time to have been fighting for this,” she said.

For Zak, she said “it has been difficult. For him I think it’s a combination between happiness to be reunited with the kids and grief that he is leaving Gaza and the situation there”.

The conflict in Gaza has been ongoing since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel estimates that 129 captives seized by militants during their attack remain in Gaza. The military says 34 of them are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Much of Gaza has been reduced to a grey landscape of rubble, with the UN estimating the cost of reconstruction at between $30 billion and $40 billion.

There has also been widespread hunger and warnings of famine as a result of aid not being allowed to enter the beleaguered territory. 

Before 7 October, Zak had been working as a translator at a research centre. Batoul had just completed her diploma in Education, with a BA in English Literature. 

Their sons were all in school in Northern Gaza, with the eldest studying computer engineering at university.

Weeks into the escalation of violence, the family, along with Zak’s sister’s family, reluctantly left their home to go south, where they were told they would be safer.

“We used to say that we’re not leaving North Gaza since the war started as [the Israeli state] were tricking us all the time,” Batoul told The Journal in March.

“We didn’t want to make it easy for them to just come and invade.” When it became “impossible” to stay, the Hania family went to Khan Yunis, a city close to Rafah.

Batoul and the children were then able to get out of the country, but her husband was forced to stay. She said men are treated differently to women there.

Kak eventually settled in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where Israel has been planning an offensive, before he was allowed to leave. He is due to fly to Dublin tomorrow.

With reporting from Mairead Maguire and AFP