Mohammed Abu Daqqa, 31, rode a jet ski from Libya toward the Italian island of Lampedusa in August, traveling about 186 miles across the Mediterranean with two fellow Palestinians. Wearing street clothes and life jackets, the three men set off from Libyan waters at about 1 a.m., towing a rubber dinghy loaded with fuel and supplies. After battling 2–3 meter waves for the first 70 kilometers, they reached calmer seas but ran out of fuel about 12 miles off Lampedusa and were rescued by a passing Romanian patrol boat. Videos and photos Abu Daqqa posted of the journey have been widely shared.
Abu Daqqa left Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack and the heavy Israeli offensive that followed. He says his business, homes and car were destroyed and that more than 250 relatives were killed. His wife and two sons, Sanad, 6, and Mahmoud, 4, survived repeated displacements and have been living in a crowded tent camp on the seashore, where food shortages worsened as famine spread in parts of Gaza.
He first managed to leave Gaza via Rafah in April 2024, hoping his family would follow, but Israel’s control of the border closed that route. Determined to get them out, Abu Daqqa traveled to Libya, where he tried to set up a delivery business importing motorcycles. After an airstrike killed members of his extended family — leaving a 25-day-old niece as the sole survivor in rubble — and his last standing home was destroyed, he concluded there was no time to wait for a smuggled boat.
He considered the jet ski idea after researching it online and with the help of ChatGPT. He bought a craft in Tripoli for about $5,000, tested it in the sea and recruited two other Palestinians to join him. The trio reached Lampedusa and Abu Daqqa was transferred to Italy, but he soon traveled to Germany and now lives in Osnabrück, where he has applied for asylum and hopes to secure a route for his family to join him.
Abu Daqqa says he tried to get visas and asylum elsewhere — including Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and China — but faced rejections and, in Beijing, a weeklong detention followed by deportation. He traveled through Malaysia and Indonesia before arriving in Europe. He regrets leaving without his family, saying that had he known how hard it would be to find a safe country that would accept them, he would have stayed and endured the danger with them. “Life here without them is not worth living,” he says.
A ceasefire offered a brief respite and a voice note from his eldest son expressed hope for escape, but bureaucratic hurdles and the continued Israeli control over parts of Gaza keep reunification uncertain. For Abu Daqqa, the jet ski crossing was both a desperate bid for safety and a gamble taken to try to bring his wife and children out of a ravaged homeland.