Nadia El-Nakla, the wife of Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, has described the fear and desperation experienced by her parents, who are trapped in Gaza with no means of escaping Israeli bombardment.
Speaking to BBC Scotland from Bute House, the first minister’s official residence in Edinburgh, El-Nakla said her parents, Elizabeth and Maged, “continually tell me they feel like they’re going to die.”
The couple, who live in Dundee, travelled to Gaza last week to visit their son and four grandchildren, as well as Maged’s 92-year-old mother, who is unwell.
In a tearful video message shared with the BBC, Elizabeth El-Nakla described the situation in the city of Deir al-Balah where she and her family remain besieged since Hamas gunmen killed hundreds across the border with Israel over the weekend.
“We have no electricity. We have no water. The food we do have which is little will not last because there’s no electricity and it will spoil.”
“I have four grandchildren in this home. A two-month-old baby, a four-year-old and, today, two nine-year-old twins, their birthday. I ask the world to help the Palestinians.”
Her daughter Nadia explained: “No electricity means no hospital supplies. It means no food: you can’t even preserve the food that you have. Again, I don’t know what it means for them for the long term. I don’t know what’s about to happen to them.”
With no international journalists in Gaza, Nadia El-Nakla said that she was struggling to get up-to-date information but wanted to preserve her parents’ phone battery life too.
“So we’ve taken numbers of neighbours. They’ve written down all our numbers. If I can’t get in touch with them, can I contact a neighbour to find out if they’re still alive? These are conversations we need to have.”
“I’m very much a planner so it’s like, how do we plan this? But at times my arms just feel like lead and it feels like I’m living in a nightmare.”
Humza Yousaf called on the UK foreign secretary on Tuesday to push for the establishment of a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians from Gaza. In a letter to James Cleverly on Tuesday, Yousaf reiterated his condemnation of the “abhorrent terrorist actions of Hamas”.
“Too many innocent people have already lost their lives as a consequence of these completely unjustifiable and illegitimate attacks by Hamas,” he wrote, adding: “Innocent men, women and children cannot, and should not, pay the price for the actions of a terrorist group”.