Stranded at a closed border as bombs fall, foreign nationals in besieged Gaza await evacuation

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — For more than a week, Talaat Ghabayen, a citizen of Norway who spent his whole life in Oslo, has waited days and nights at the Gaza Strip's land crossing with Egypt as his embassy advised, hoping to flee Israel's bombardment and looming ground invasion and reunite with his wife and sons back home.

“Egypt is literally meters away, I can see it,” Ghabayen, a 54-year-old insurance agent who traveled to Gaza before the war erupted for his mother's funeral, said Tuesday from the Rafah crossing.

Under intense Western pressure, the gates at Rafah opened over the weekend for the first time since the war, letting a trickle of humanitarian aid into the besieged strip and stoking hopes that hundreds of foreign nationals trapped in Gaza would be able to cross into safety.

But with each passing hour, Ghabayen loses hope. And each day that Rafah remains shut, he said, is another day that he could die.