Two men, one wearing yellow flip-flops, the other some kind of espadrilles, went outside to smoke a cigarette in the November drizzle in Roissy, north of Paris, to kill time and ward off their anxiety. In the vast hall of this modern airport hotel, where businessmen and busy tourists pass through, others are forced to wait. A group of women decided to go and buy clothes for their children. They left the Gaza Strip, bombed for weeks by the Israeli army in retaliation for the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7, taking less than the bare minimum.

These French-Palestinians were repatriated to Paris on several flights starting November 3. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 115 people – French nationals, their dependents and the staff of the French Institute – had been repatriated to France from Gaza by Friday, November 17, almost all of those who had applied. "We are still working on a few cases of people where the situation is more complicated," said Anne-Claire Legendre, spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Most of them are now "safe."

It depends on what is meant by "safe." They themselves may be physically safe, along with spouses and children, after weeks of wondering whether the next missile was going to hit them, their cousins, their neighbors or the shopkeeper down the street. Weeks of being in shock and constantly shaking. But safe in general? Certainly not. None of the people interviewed by Le Monde wished to reveal their identity; each chose a pseudonym and, in the case of those interviewed outside of the Paris region, refused to allow their town to be mentioned. Fear clings to them, they tremble for their families left behind, for the injured.

Ali, the man in espadrilles, is 83 years old. He knows he won't be going back to Gaza, to his Délice café, where he masterfully handled the espresso machine, the first in Gaza City. The café was quite popular, selling baguettes and croissants, and deserved its name. "I was still doing very well," he said proudly, glancing sideways. At the start, in 1997, he had a French pastry chef. "He chose the name." His building on the seafront was hit three times by Israeli air strikes. Injured in the leg, the 83-year-old went to the Al-Shifa hospital, now occupied by the Israeli army, where nobody found the time to treat him properly.

A younger friend organized his escape to Rafah, south of the Palestinian enclave on the Egyptian border, in a beat-up car. "After that, it's the waiting that kills you," summed up Ali. "The [Israeli army] planes fly back and forth over our heads. Sometimes, they strike. We don't know who or where." He described one perpetual night in which he was barricaded with others, without electricity, where all you could hear was the noise and where you blindly waited for breaks from the bombing.

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