CAIRO/RAMALLAH/GAZA BORDER: For more than a year, Zionist entity authorities prevented Ayed Ayoub from escaping Gaza's hunger and war with his family for an academic fellowship in France. He finally left last month, after the entity unexpectedly eased its tight control of the border. Ayoub, his wife and their four children are among around 1,000 Palestinians who have left Gaza following the Zionist entity's relaxation of rules in recent months, bussed from the enclave to board flights to Europe and elsewhere, according to interviews with affected Gazans and foreign diplomats.

"The situation in Gaza has become unbearable," said 57-year-old Ayoub, an engineer who earned his doctorate and masters degree at a French university after moving there in the early 2000s. His return was as part of a group of 115 Gazans accepted by France in April. The new departures require a request to the Zionist entity by a foreign government and their numbers remain relatively small.

Reuters could not establish why the Zionist entity was now letting more Palestinians leave Gaza, which comes amid international outcry over the humanitarian conditions there. However, the easing of restrictions parallels the Zionist entity's government's stated goal of facilitating the resettlement of Gaza's population in other countries.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, talk of mass resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza has helped shore up support with far-right allies who oppose a further truce with Hamas and want to re-establish Jewish settlements there. Interior Minister Moshe Arbel has described the recent departure of Gazans to European countries as a bid to temporarily and voluntarily vacate the Gaza Strip to allow for its reconstruction, a process he said was inspired by Donald Trump.

The Republican US president has proposed developing the enclave as a coastal resort, free of Palestinians. "I thank President Trump for thinking of this important initiative," Arbel said on April 1, after supervising the departure of a flight taking Gazans to Germany. "Together, joining forces, we will turn this place into a paradise. With God's help, let us succeed."

Despite the comments from Arbel, five Zionist entity officials told Reuters the easing of restrictions was not a direct response to Trump's Gaza proposal or part of any such plan. One of the officials said the Zionist entity was not trying to reduce Gaza's population but rather responding to mounting requests by countries seeking to help people reach a safe destination.

For many Palestinians, the opportunity to move is fraught with echoes of historical dispossession of their lands. Ayoub and others among those who recently left told Reuters their departure was only temporary. However, nearly half of Gazans would now consider leaving, according to a recent Palestinian poll, after the Zionist entity's 19-month offensive has left much of the strip in ruins, with its population largely displaced and dependent on dwindling aid supplies.

'We need receiving states'

Netanyahu has hailed Trump's idea for Gaza but cites a major obstacle: "We have one problem - we need receiving states," he told a hawkish group of Gaza war veterans on Tuesday. Neighbors Jordan and Syria - which have large Palestinian refugee populations dating back decades - and Egypt are loathe to take in large numbers of Gazans. For this story, Reuters spoke with five Gazans who have left recently, along with nine foreign diplomats and seven Zionist entity officials to establish details of the impact of the new rules around exits from Gaza.

The foreign diplomats said the entity began informing foreign governments late last year, before Trump took office and floated his proposal, that they would soon ease the restrictions. The diplomats asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The relaxed restrictions largely took effect at the start of the year. Zionist entity officials now take days instead of weeks or months to approve requests for Palestinians with foreign citizenship, their relatives, and recipients of foreign scholarships, the diplomats involved said. Among those now allowed to leave were Palestinians previously denied exit by the Zionist entity on security grounds, they added.

In late March, the Zionist government established a new agency that would help Gazans who want to resettle in third countries. Reuters was unable to establish whether the department is functioning. Reuters could not establish exactly how many people had been able to leave under the new criteria. Three diplomats estimated at least a thousand, while several said they could only be sure of their own citizens, citing numbers in the high hundreds. Over a dozen, primarily European, countries have now been able to get people out from Gaza, with most exits occurring since March, all the diplomats said.

Only a fraction of Gazans meet the present Zionist entity criteria for being allowed out. For those who do, the choice is not easy. Many fear leaving their land would result in another "Nakba" or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed of their homes in 1948 to make way for the creation of the Zionist entity. Many of those hoping to return within weeks remained refugees. "We will come back to Gaza once the conditions allow, as soon as we can," said poet Dunia Al-Amal Ismail, a 53-year-old widow who made it out as part of the same group as Ayoub, with her 21-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son.

An academic among the group that recently arrived in France described meeting the foreign diplomats in the desert. "All of a sudden, a fridge appears from nowhere, and you see everything you have been deprived of for many months," he told Reuters. "I ate, but with pain in my chest for the people who we left behind." — Reuters