At two thirty in the afternoon this Thursday, 139 Hispanic Gazans tightened their seatbelts and breathed easy. The nightmare they have been living since Hamas committed a massive massacre of people in Israel on October 7 was closer to ending. Because at that time a flight from the Air and Space Army was taking off from Cairo airport heading to Madrid, where they will begin a new life.
There were five hours of flight with sadness and uncertainty about the future, which ended at six in the afternoon at the Torrejón Air Base, where the A330 of the Spanish Air Force landed.
At the foot of the stairs, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and of Defense, Margarita Robles, received the Hispanic Gazans. There were 67 minors, 3 of them babies under one year old, 39 women and 33 men. Of the group, 85 had dual Spanish-Palestinian nationality and the rest entered with a Palestinian passport. Because although Spain does not officially recognize Palestine as a State, the Palestinian National Authority has issued a passport recognized by Spain since 1995.
This concluded a new evacuation from Spain, which this year has faced this protocol on several occasions this year, when civilian personnel have been extracted from Sudan, Ethiopia, Niger and Israel itself, from where more than 200 citizens returned.
If in the case of Israel the tension was maximum on the part of the Operations Command, they even had to abort a first takeoff due to the missiles that Hamas launched at the Tel Aviv airport, in Gaza the wear and tear of the evacuation has fallen on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Because Spain has needed the dedication of 50 diplomats and 12 days of negotiations since Israel and Egypt opened the Rafah crossing to authorize the departure of the first Spaniards. The situation dragged on so long that Minister Robles acknowledged the “concern” because they could not get citizens with Spanish nationality to leave. Diplomatic sources then called Robles “irresponsible” because she even suggested that Hamas “blocked some exits.”
But this afternoon in Torrejón everything was cordial between the two ministers, witnesses of the conditions in which the 139 people arrived who had expressed to the Consulate their need to leave Gaza as the attacks intensified.
They had left Gaza in three groups. The first, last Monday, with 40 people. On Tuesday they managed to evacuate 74 and yesterday, finally, 29. All of them, after crossing the Rafah crossing, passed a second checkpoint by the Egyptian authorities and then members of the consulate put them on buses to travel the 374 kilometers that separate Rafah from Cairo. Both those on Monday and those on Tuesday waited in a hotel for the evacuation of the last civilians to be completed so they could all return to Spain. The Government evacuated 143 people, but 139 boarded on the final flight.
Effort also of the military who participated in the evacuation. There were 13 soldiers from the 45th Air Force group, 8 from the Air Deployment Support Squadron, 4 from the Aeroevacuation Medical Unit and 4 from the Combat Air Command. All coordinated by a team made up of 15 people from the Operations Command dependent on the Defense Staff. They all spent the night from Wednesday to Thursday awake, as the flight was authorized to depart at 4 in the morning, and they arrived in Cairo half an hour after 9, local time. Six hours later, they left for Spain.