According to the federal government, more than 30 Germans were able to leave the embattled Gaza Strip on Friday. This includes families with children, the Foreign Office announced in the evening via X, formerly Twitter. The team at the German embassy in Cairo is now looking after her, it said. “We are continuing our efforts and working intensively to ensure that more Germans can leave the country.” At the same time, 34 French people were also able to leave the Gaza Strip, as the Foreign Ministry announced in Paris.
Already on Wednesday, German citizens were among the foreigners who were able to leave the Gaza Strip for Egypt. This was a low single-digit number of employees of international aid organizations. They were also met at the Rafah border crossing by a team from the Cairo embassy.
Rafah is the only border crossing not controlled by Israel. On Wednesday, for the first time since the start of the Gaza war on October 7th, hundreds of foreigners and Palestinians were able to leave the coastal strip that was otherwise sealed off by Israel towards Egypt with a second passport.
Despite the war in Gaza, there are still several thousand German citizens in the crisis region in the Middle East. According to information from the Foreign Office last week, around 2,700 Germans were in Israel at the time. The Berlin ministry assumed there would be a “low three-digit” number of people in the Gaza Strip. In total there are said to be around 490 people in the Palestinian territories. However, only those German citizens who have voluntarily registered on a crisis preparedness list run by the Foreign Office are counted.
