Extract from ABC News
At the Islamic College of Brisbane in the city's south, three families sit around the kind of large circular tables you get at every school function.
They're refugees from the war in Gaza, and the college has welcomed them with a huge spread of traditional Palestinian food.
After many months of chaos, it's a small moment of familiarity.
But the presence of a television camera moving about the room is anything but familiar, and is making some feel self-conscious.
One man, Amer Elhabbash, would later confide that being filmed eating, while his friends and family back home endured terrible suffering, made him feel guilty.
"Many people will see and believe that I am now comfortable after I arrive in Australia," the father of three told 7.30.
"Yes, I feel safe, but I don't feel comfortable at all because my friends and relatives are in Gaza.
"These feelings I have at night … what have I done? It was just I and my family who escaped Gaza and the death and the war."
Running from death
Before the war, Amer and his family lived a very prosperous life by Gazan standards.
He was an institutional development consultant while his wife Nevin worked for the local water authority.
"Our life was very good, very nice. We are educated also, me and my wife holding master's degrees," he said.
But that changed very quickly after October 7.
One of the first rounds of Israeli air strikes on Gaza City, following the Hamas terror attacks on Israel, destroyed the family car parked out the front of their building.
"My daughter came and woke me up and was very scared. She stayed in my arms for maybe four hours," Amer told 7.30.
Soon afterwards, their section of the city was declared a 'military zone', and Amer and Nevin decided to flee south to Khan Younis with their children Faisal, 14, Aws, 13, and Saba, 8, as well as Amer's 72-year-old mother Sadeya.
"On our way to Khan Younis I had a call and they told me my wife's uncle and all his family, his wife and his sons, were killed by the Israeli [air strikes]," he said.
Amer was also sent photos and videos showing that their home in Gaza City had been destroyed.
In Khan Younis they lived with a large group of extended family members, but after the city also came under attack, they split up: one group living with one uncle, the rest with another.
"[The other] home with my uncle, aunt, uncle's wife was bomb-striked by the Israelis," Amer said.
"My aunt and uncle's wife were dead. Also, my cousins, they were all dead."
The last option was a move to the extreme west of the strip, to a refugee camp overlooking the sea near Al Mawasi.
They would spend many weeks living in tents, waiting for a visa application to Australia to be processed.
"We were civilians; now they returned us to the stone age," Amer said.
"Each day we have to wake up to cut off the roots of trees and start to search for water.
"Many times, I, my wife and my kids were eating bread with some sand."
Desperate to get out, Amer said he eventually bribed Egyptian border officials the equivalent of more than $26,000 to get his family's application put through.
"In the middle of February … many people called me to say, 'your name is on the list!'
"The following morning, we went to the border crossing at Rafah, and thank God we succeeded to get out of Gaza."
'I was very afraid'
Tamer Abunada, his heavily pregnant wife Afnan, and their three children Ismail, 13, Raseel, 12, and Adam, 7, also fled Gaza City when the war broke out.
Tamer and Afnan had recently opened a kindergarten, after struggling to find work in accountancy and pharmacy respectively, which Tamer blamed on "politics".
"I rented a place; I made a prestigious kindergarten and I have a Facebook page and everything," Tamer said.
One hundred children were registered to come to the kindergarten, which opened in September last year.
"We did this for one month only, and then we lost everything."
The school was destroyed by an Israeli bombing, just a few days after October 7.
Tamer's brother had migrated to Brisbane a couple of years earlier and offered to submit visas on their behalf.
Tamer initially resisted.
"I told him, 'no, no, inshallah, in 10 days it will be finished,'" he said.
"After that, when I saw the bombing everywhere, destruction everywhere, I told him, 'Yeah, go for it.'"
Bombs dropping every night
The family travelled to Rafah and lived on blankets and wooden chairs while they waited for their turn to cross into Egypt.
"Everything is hard. You cannot find clean water to drink, to cook. You cannot find some kinds of food, because there is no electricity from day one.
"There is no safety. You cannot feel safe anywhere."
Hearing bombing all around them every night, the family would huddle together.
"Every night before sleeping I go to my kids one-by-one, I kiss them, I hug them, [I tell them] 'Daddy inshallah tomorrow, I'll see you in the morning'.
"I told them, 'Don't worry baba, if we pass away, we are shahid, we will all go to the heavens inshallah.'"
For months, Afnan was unable to see a specialist or doctor of any kind regarding her pregnancy, as the hospitals were "only for the injured".
Finally, in late March, a cousin came to Tamer with good news.
"He said 'your name has appeared on the Egyptian authority border (list).'
"I said 'you are a liar; I need to see with my own eyes'!"
The Abunada family would first head to Cairo and then onto Brisbane, where Afnan gave birth to a baby girl, Celine, just a few days later at Redland hospital.
"I'm very lucky to have joined this country, but still my feeling is very bad [for] my people," Tamer said.
"Now I have 90 days in Australia and every day I hear [of] bombing and killing more than before.
"My family and my wife's family — her father, mother, brother, sisters — are all in Gaza, and it was very impactful on her while she was pregnant … and I was very afraid."
Nidal's lucky escape
Fifty-year-old Shahrazad Haseera and her 14-year-old son Nidal are also trying to adjust to life in Brisbane.
The pair lived in the Nuseirat Camp in central Gaza before the war, a city created by refugees from the 1948 conflict.
Shahrazad and Nidal had been on a UN refugee waiting list since 2016 and were approved for repatriation to Australia in 2022.
However, when war broke out in late 2023 they were still waiting, and Shahrazad told 7.30 they saw many friends and neighbours killed and injured when the bombing came to their city.
"There was a bombing on a field where Nidal and another one of his friends were playing, standing right next to each other," she said.
"Nidal's friend was hit in the head by shrapnel from the explosions. The ambulance came and took him. He was not dead, but he was completely paralysed.
"I was so frightened and worried for my son Nidal, because he wasn't showing any emotions.
"He wasn't crying. He seemed emotionless, and very hardened."
After several weeks of moving between camps and schools, all the while begging UN staff to fast-track their visas, they were finally approved to leave.
With just Nidal's school bag and a change of clothes packed onto a donkey, they made a tear-filled journey out of Nuseirat Camp towards the border crossing at Rafah.
"We passed through the streets and all the houses were destroyed," she said.
"People were trying to get the trapped or dead people out from under the rubble, others were burying the bodies of the dead people. [We could see] body parts, limbs of the dead.
"We were so exhausted, and emotionally distressed … especially that I had to leave my parents and family behind."
Families still processing their grief
Now in Brisbane, Nidal has been enrolled in the Islamic College of Brisbane and, according to his teachers, has made remarkable progress.
The other refugee children are also enthusiastic learners, which the head of the college attributed to a return to feeling safe and stable at school.
But the school community is very aware that both parents and students carry with them deep emotional wounds.
They know these families need support to establish themselves in a new city, to live with the grief they have for their friends and family left behind, and to cast off any guilt they have for getting out.
"I know that most of Australia's population are refugees," Shahrazad said.
"That's why they must empathise with us more than the people of any other western country because they lived through oppression, injustice, colonisation, wars, famine, and disease.
"Everything I just said, we have in Gaza."
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