Eduardo González
A group of around forty Spanish-Palestinian citizens, half of them minors, left the Gaza Strip yesterday and managed to reach Egypt through the Rafah border crossing, according to acting Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares.
“Yesterday (Sunday), Israel finally gave, after many negotiations, the authorization for a first contingent of Hispanic Palestinians to cross today (yesterday) to Egypt,” Albares told the press in Brussels before participating in the EU Foreign Affairs Council.
At the press conference after the Council, the Minister confirmed that these forty people (33 Spanish-Palestinians and seven family members) had already crossed the first Palestinian checkpoint and, after several hours of formalities, had managed to pass “definitively” the second Egyptian checkpoint, from where, after being received by staff of the Spanish Embassy, they were transferred in buses to Cairo.
He also said that authorization had already been obtained from the Israeli government for another group of about eighty people, who, pending authorization from the Egyptian government (“there should be no difficulty in this”), could leave Gaza today through the Rafah crossing “if it is open, which is not open every day, we will know tomorrow”. According to the minister, in these first evacuations, preference is being given to families with small children and elderly people in vulnerable situations.
