Community comes together for family of Laval prof from Gaza
Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
editor@qctonline.com
When Zakaria Helles went to bed on Oct. 6, 2023, he was still counting the days until he could return home to his wife, Islam Helles, and their five young children in the Gaza Strip.
Zakaria Helles, a civil engineering professor, arrived in Quebec City in August 2023, for a three-month fellowship at Université Laval. It was the first time he’d ever travelled outside of Gaza, and the first time he’d spent any significant amount of time away from his family since his wedding. “I left, and my kids were crying, and I was trying to convince them that it would just be a few months, I’d be back as soon as I could, no problem.”
Events beyond his control would decide otherwise. Early in the morning of Oct. 7, the militant Palestinian nationalist group Hamas fired thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel; in a co-ordinated series of terror attacks, an estimated 1,100 Israelis and foreigners were killed and hundreds taken hostage. Israeli retaliation was swift and violent, and Gaza was cut off from the world.
“In the morning, my wife was preparing the kids’ lunchboxes – it was a normal day,” Helles said. By midday, the children and their mother were refugees, with only the clothes on their backs. They began a series of desperate moves of which Zakaria Helles, on the other side of the Atlantic, soon lost count. “Many, many times.”
He was pitched into a frantic spiral of uncertainty, trying to find the financial and legal means to extend his own stay in Quebec, while not knowing if his own wife and children were dead or alive. “It was an ocean of problems, and I didn’t know where to start,” he remembered.
Out of that ocean of problems, Helles’ friends, his employer and provincial and federal elected officials helped build a life raft that brought his wife and children to Quebec City earlier this summer.
At a protest calling for an end to violence against Palestinian civilians, Helles met fellow Laval professor Jesse Greener. “He [Greener] told me, ‘We have no time to waste; we have to act.” I said, ‘What can we do?’”
Greener and his partner, Nora Loreto, fronted $40,000 of their own savings to help the family through the expensive, perilous process of evacuating to Egypt and onward to Cana- da. Through a contact in the West Bank, Helles was able to get his children new passports to replace the ones left in their destroyed home, pay their way across the border and find a place to live while the Cana- dian government reviewed their family reunification visa applications – normally only offered to the family members of citizens and permanent residents. In January, the federal government announced it would give up to 1,000 temporary residence permits to evacuees from Gaza with fam- ily members in Canada, but advocates have decried the program as overly strict, poorly organized, slow and prone to technical glitches; as of mid- June, only 108 people had arrived in Canada through this scheme, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. An estimated 90 per cent of Gaza’s civilian population has been forced from their homes since the conflict began, according to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordi- nation of Humanitarian Affairs, and only a fraction have been safely resettled abroad. Helles knows his family are among the lucky ones.
“Everyone told me, you’re blessed to get everything ac- complished so quickly,” Helles said. He credits the “total support” of his friends, his employer, MP Joël Lightbound, Mayor Bruno Marchand’s office and the Québec Solidaire caucus for allowing the five children and their mother to safely enter the country. They don’t know when or if they’ll be able to return to their old lives in Gaza; rebuilding basic infrastructure in the occupied territory is expected to take decades.
The four eldest Helles children – Maryam, 11; Mira, 9; Layam, 6; and Hisham, 4 – are eagerly learning French along- side their parents, learning their way around the city and getting ready for school in the fall. The youngest, Razam, 18 months, is learning to recognize her father again. “When I left her, she was just a baby,” Helles said. “She doesn’t know me. Right now, I’m just trying to do my best to make her feel safe.”