'I Want To Get The Hell Out Of Here': Thousands Of Palestinians Are Leaving Gaza

For over a decade, the Gaza Strip — controlled by the Islamist militant group Hamas, blockaded by its neighbors, difficult to leave — has amounted to an experiment in human isolation.

Now there is a new escape route. Egypt suddenly opened its border with Gaza in May 2018, and, facing increasingly unbearable living conditions, tens of thousands of Gazans are believed to have crossed that border and scattered across the world, in the latest chapter in a mass exodus of migrants out of the troubled Middle East.

"I didn't find my future here," says Zeid Al Kurdi, 25, at the Gaza-Egypt border with just a backpack and small rolling suitcase.

He grew up in a refugee camp and, like most Gazans, relied on United Nations food rations. His family's house was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in 2008, during the first of three wars that Hamas and Israel have fought, and his father went broke paying off a loan to rebuild it.