‘An incredible moment’: Palestinian family reunited in Quebec after months of fear

It was a moment Zakaria Helles had been dreaming about for 10 months. On June 24, he stood at Quebec City’s Jean Lesage airport, surrounded by supporters, waiting to finally hold his wife, Islam, and their five children in his arms again.

“To hug them and hold them in my arms, to make sure they’re alive, that they’re not hurt,” Helles says, reflecting on the day from the dining room table of his temporary home. “They’re still here, and they’re with me in Quebec. That was an incredible moment.”

Helles first arrived in Quebec City last August, where he took up a role as a visiting professor of civil and hydraulic engineering at Université Laval. His stay was scheduled to end in November, but disaster struck just a month before his scheduled return home.

“That was a terrible time and I would not like to remember it… The war started in Gaza at 6 in the morning and I was in Quebec where it was around midnight. I was asleep,” Helles recalls. “I woke up early in the morning with hundreds of messages.”

Helles couldn’t believe his eyes and immediately tried to contact his wife, but at that time there was no electricity and no access to telephone lines in their house.

“After a while I was able to make a (connection) with her, and check if she was still alive and if the family was still alive.”

Helles says his family made it to safety, but their home in Gaza was completely destroyed, along with everything in it. His wife and children spent the next few months traveling on foot, from place to place, eventually stopping in Rafah.

Meanwhile, Helles was desperately trying to find ways to get them out.

“I lack the ability and capacity to illustrate or even express my feelings at that time,” he says. “Your family, your little children are caught in the middle of the struggle.”

Helles says his children, ages 18 months to 12, have struggled with access to food and clean water. But, he says, he always felt his wife was strong and could pull the family through, which gave him hope they would make it.

Nora Loreto, a freelance writer and activist in Quebec City, felt a personal duty to help Helles.

Loreto and her partner have been good friends with Helles for months, meeting at gatherings and through her partner’s work at the university.

“We saw him quite regularly. We invited him over for Christmas this year, which was nice,” says Loreto.

She and her partner looked for ways to get Helles’ family out of Rafah, but knew that Helles did not qualify for the Canadian government’s special program because he was neither a permanent resident nor a Canadian citizen.

“We were always concerned that the official channels to reunite him with his family, whether that was in another country or bringing his family to Canada, would be a dead end,” Loreto said.

According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 359 people who left Gaza “on their own accord” and applied for temporary resident visas have been allowed to enter Canada through June 29; 118 people entered the country under the temporary government policy.

As spring approached, Loreto felt that time was running out. It became clear that the Rafah crossing would soon be closed and that there was no escape.

Like many, she was forced to hire a private Egyptian consulting and tourism company known as Hala to help get the family out. The company charges about US$5,000 per person to get them on an official evacuee list.

Initially, Loreto set up a crowdfunding page to help the family leave. But she quickly realized they didn’t have time to wait for people to contribute, and she and her partner paid just under $40,000 to help Helles’ children, mother, wife and brother leave by themselves.

“We were lucky that we did it when we did, because the border was closed shortly after,” Loreto says. “When you see the death toll, the tens of thousands of children that were killed, the children that were maimed and orphaned … I think most people would say, ‘Well, what can I do?’”

Helles and his family are now making up for lost time in Quebec City and are preparing to move into an apartment later this month with the help of local friends. His work permit has been extended for two years, and he and his family have already enrolled in franchising classes in hopes of calling the region home permanently.

“I feel like my family is part of the Quebec family,” he says. “We are part of this very remarkable community.”

© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.