The real cost to leave Gaza in 2026 — and why we choose to stay

People who follow our story from abroad ask me one question more than any other. Not how we eat, not where we sleep, but this: "If it is so dangerous, why don't you just leave?"

It is a fair question, and it deserves an honest, unsentimental answer. So I sat down and did the arithmetic the way I would calculate the cost of a harvest or the yield of a field. I am an agricultural engineer; numbers are how I think.

The cost to leave Gaza in 2026 is not a single ticket price. It is a wall of fees, paperwork, closed gates, and the near-certainty of never coming back. For a family of four like mine, the coordination fees alone now come to roughly $140,000 — about $35,000 for each of us, and that figure no longer spares the children.

This article is the math, plainly laid out, and then the harder part: why, even if a stranger handed us the money tomorrow, we would still choose to survive here on our own land.

Let me introduce myself first, so you know who is doing this counting. My name is Mohammed Z. Al-Shanti. I am an agricultural engineer in my late thirties, registered with the Palestinian Agricultural Engineers Association, and I am displaced in northern Gaza. My wife was a teacher before the war. We have two children: Ibrahim, who is six and has known mostly war, and a daughter who was born in December 2025 and is about six months old now.

I have no income. The fields I worked are gone or unreachable. So when I talk about the cost to leave Gaza in 2026, I am not talking about a number on a spreadsheet I could ever pay. I am talking about a sum that, for a family that has lost its home, its work, and its savings, may as well be the price of the moon.

Why "just leave" is the wrong question

When people ask why don't Gazans leave, the question carries an assumption: that there is an open door, and we are simply choosing not to walk through it. I want to gently correct that, because the truth is the opposite. For most of this war there was no door at all.

Gaza has exactly one crossing to the outside world that is not into Israel: Rafah, on the Egyptian side. It was wrecked during Israel's Rafah ground operation in May 2024 and stayed closed except for brief ceasefire windows. Under the 2026 ceasefire, COGAT announced a reopening around the end of January, and UN OCHA reported Rafah reopening around 19 March 2026 for limited two-way movement only.

"Limited" is the important word. Movement requires advance security clearance. Return into Gaza is allowed only for those who left during the war and were already cleared. So the picture in your mind of a family packing a car and driving to a border that simply lets them through does not exist here. It never did.

The Rafah crossing fees in 2026 — and the years before

Here is the part that shocks people the most. Throughout the war, getting your name onto the Rafah exit list was not free, and it was not a matter of waiting your turn. Private "coordination" companies on the Egyptian side charged families to be added to the list.

Earlier in the war, multiple outlets documented this — France 24's Observers, the Times of Israel, +972 Magazine, New Lines Magazine. Even then the figures were staggering: roughly $5,000 to $10,000 per adult. The price has only climbed since. Right now, in mid-2026, the rate I can confirm from inside Gaza is about $35,000 per person — and the reduced rate that once existed for young children is gone. Every member of my family, including my baby daughter, would count as a full $35,000.

Sit with that for a moment. For one single person to be allowed to leave, a family now pays about $35,000 in coordination fees alone — not for a flight, not for a visa, just for the right to have their name placed on a list controlled by a private broker.

And those fees, enormous as they are, are only the entry ticket. They do not include passports and the paperwork to renew them, transport from Gaza to the crossing, transport onward inside Egypt, or — the largest hidden cost of all — the months or years of living expenses in a country where Gazans generally cannot legally work.

The cost does not end at the border

Imagine, somehow, the fees are paid and we are on the list. We cross into Egypt. What then? This is where the cost to evacuate a family from Gaza quietly becomes a cost of living in exile that never stops.

Gazans who reach Egypt generally cannot work legally. That means rent, food, water, medicine, formula for my daughter, and school for Ibrahim all have to come from savings we do not have or from charity, indefinitely, in a foreign city where we know no one and own nothing.

• Passport renewal and documentation: costly and slow, often requiring its own fees and waiting.
• Transport to Rafah and onward into Egypt: paid in cash, at war-time prices.
• Rent abroad: due every month, with no income to meet it.
• No legal work: the single fact that turns a one-time fee into a permanent crisis.
• No guaranteed return: historically, leaving meant possibly never coming back to our land or our relatives.

Why most families could never save this money

There is a cruel logic to the timing. The same war that makes people want to leave is the war that strips away any means of paying to leave. Around 90% of Gaza's population has been displaced, most of us multiple times, according to UNRWA. We have lost homes, jobs, and savings.

I had a profession. My wife had a profession. Between us we should have been the kind of family that could, in a normal world, scrape together an emergency fund. But there is no income to save from, no bank you can trust, and prices for everything have multiplied. Accumulating $140,000 in this situation is not difficult — it is impossible without outside help.

So when someone asks why Gazans don't leave, the honest answer has three parts: the door was closed; when it opened, it opened only a crack and only with clearance; and the price of squeezing through that crack is a fortune we cannot reach. "Just leave" assumes a freedom we have never had.

A bag we once packed and never used. Leaving Gaza was never as simple as deciding to go.

The math I actually ran for my own family

I want to show you the calculation I made, because it explains our decision better than any emotion could. Suppose a generous donor read our story and said: "I will give you $30,000." It would be an extraordinary act of kindness. But here is the hard truth: $30,000 would not get even one of us out — a single exit now costs about $35,000, and all four of us is roughly $140,000. So the real question was never whether $30,000 could buy our escape. It cannot. The question is what $30,000 could actually do for us.

It would buy an uncertain place on an exit list. Then it would buy a precarious, work-banned existence abroad, where the money drains week by week with nothing coming in, in a place far from the land that is the only thing we still have. Within a year or two it would be gone, and we would be displaced again — this time with no home to return to.

Now suppose the same donor gave that $30,000 differently — not as an escape fund, but as monthly survival support of about $1,690. Watch what happens to the timeline.

That is the whole argument, in one box. The kindest, most efficient thing a donor can do is not help us flee. It is help us survive where we are, on the land that is the entire reason we are still a family and not scattered refugees.

What our monthly survival actually costs

So that the number $1,690 is not abstract, here is exactly where it goes every month. I publish receipts and spending updates, because I would want the same honesty if I were the one giving.

Compare the two budgets honestly. About $140,000 for a one-time, uncertain departure into exile — or about $1,690 a month to keep us fed, sheltered, and rooted. For a donor who genuinely wants their money to matter, the second is not only cheaper. It is the only version that actually works.

Why we stay — and it is not only the money

I have given you the economics because they are decisive. But I would be dishonest if I let you think the only reason we stay is that leaving is unaffordable. Even if the fees vanished, I think we would stay. Let me explain why, as plainly as I can.

None of this is to judge anyone who did leave. Every family makes its own impossible calculation, and some had no choice but to go. I am only telling you ours, and why for us the answer to "why don't you leave" is that staying alive here is both more possible and more meaningful than fleeing into a poverty with no land under it.

How your help fits into the choice to stay

If you have read this far, you understand the situation better than most. The most useful thing you can do is not fund an escape. It is to help a verified family survive in place, month by month, until this ends. Here is how that works, step by step.

Translate any amount into something concrete: $100 covers a month of internet that keeps me documenting and reachable; $200 is our cooking gas; $110 is a month of formula and diapers for my daughter; $420 feeds all four of us for a month. And $1,690 is one whole month of staying alive on our own land instead of fleeing into exile.