A week into Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2023, which followed Hamas’s deadly terrorist attack on Israel, Scotland’s then first minister Humza Yousaf received a text from his mother-in-law, Elizabeth. “Humza, I think we are about to die. I need you to promise me that you will take care of my girls.”
Elizabeth, a retired nurse from Dundee, and her Palestinian husband, Maged, had been visiting family in Gaza and become trapped there when the bombing began. Not only were people dying all around them, but their house was filling up with friends and neighbours whose homes had been destroyed, and they were running out of food. On the night Elizabeth texted, they had been told to leave their neighbourhood of Deir al-Balah ahead of a fresh wave of Israeli strikes. They later learned the evacuation order was a false alarm. Even so, Yousaf reflects, “in the four weeks from hell, this felt like the lowest point”.
