Nadia El-Nakla, the wife of Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, has said three of her young cousins from Gaza, including a two-year-old, have shrapnel injuries after an Israeli drone missile hit near them.
Speaking to the Guardian on Tuesday an hour before her husband made his closing address to the Scottish National party’s annual conference, El-Nakla said her mother had called her with the news, “really shaken and really upset”, just before the interview began.
El-Nakla’s parents, Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla, who live in Dundee, travelled to Gaza earlier this month to visit their son and four grandchildren as well as Maged’s 92-year-old mother, who is unwell.
“[My mother] called about 20 minutes ago to say that my aunt and uncle were outside with the kids,” El-Nakla said. “I’m still trying to seek clarity from my mum about this, because she was so upset, but she said they got hit when a missile drone hit off metal. So thankfully it didn’t hit them directly, but the kids – especially the two-year-old – have a lot of shrapnel under their skin.”
El-Nakla said her mother, a former nurse, was now trying to treat the children using tweezers that she had in her holiday packing, and she was concerned about the risk of infection.
Her parents have been trapped in the city of Deir al-Balah since Hamas gunmen massacred more than 1,300 mostly civilian Israelis 10 days ago.
Since then, El-Nakla, a psychotherapist and SNP councillor for Dundee, and her husband have shared in brutal detail the day-to-day impact of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that followed those shock attacks.
Yousaf has continued to urge the UK government to push for the establishment of a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians and let supplies and aid into the territory, and shared moving clips of his mother-in-law pleading for help on behalf of her family and neighbours.
El-Nakla said her mother had texted her earlier in the morning to report that the household had run out of clean water. “The only water they have now is salty. That really upset me because obviously that can also make people sick. There’s no electricity and no hospital facilities,” she said.
“The humanitarian crisis is very real,” she went on. “Actually nowhere is safe in Gaza. People are starting to go to the hospitals to sleep outside because they think that a hospital won’t be hit in the night.”
El-Nakla said her parents had remained at the family home in Deir al-Balah, in the middle of Gaza, after the Israeli army ordered 1.1 million people to evacuate to the south of the strip.
“My worry is that they’ve asked people to go from the north to the south, which is closer to the Egyptian border, with that invisible barrier being Deir al-Balah, where my parents are from. If the Israeli military are planning on continuing to move more people south, the next area will be my parents’,” she said.
“I asked them: what is your plan if you’re asked to leave? And they came back saying ‘we don’t have one, we’ll have nowhere to go’.
“I really don’t know where they would go so I’m just desperately praying that that doesn’t happen. My gran is 93 and in a wheelchair. We’re not talking about paved roads, we’re talking about dust. And I also have an eight-week-old nephew – how can you keep him in the sun outside?”
El-Nakla said she was disappointed that there had not been more discussion of the “genuine facilitation of peace” in Westminster on Tuesday.
“For me, there’s three things that must happen. There’s facilitating a ceasefire, immediately. There’s the opening of humanitarian corridors, immediately. They’re on their knees, there’s no medical supplies and they’re running out of food. And the third one is to allow foreign nationals [to leave] and to let out those that can seek safety elsewhere.”
She said she had been heartbroken by reports of the Hamas attacks on Israeli homes and the Supernova music festival.
“I can only imagine how terrifying that must have been … My heart broke for all those families and for all those people that were scared for their lives. And then also at the back of my mind was heartbreak at the repercussions that will follow this.”
During his conference speech, Yousaf called on the UK government to support the medical evacuation of injured civilians in Gaza, adding: “Scotland is ready to play her part and our hospitals will treat the injured men, women and children of Gaza where we can.”
He called on Westminster to begin immediate work on a refugee resettlement scheme for people from Gaza who wished to leave the territory.
