Bus crash in Egypt kills 22 including Jordanian refugees from Gaza

CAIRO — Twenty-two people, including ten Jordanian citizens, were killed when a passenger bus overturned on the Dahab–Nuweiba road in Egypt's South Sinai governorate on Wednesday morning, authorities said, in a crash that has exposed the precarious lives of families already uprooted by war.

The bus was carrying 43 people, including 22 Jordanians, when it flipped over, Egypt's health ministry said. Spokesman Hossam Abdel Ghaffar said 20 ambulances were dispatched to the scene; the death toll was initially reported as 16 before rising to 22, with 28 injured. Jordan's state-run Al Mamlaka channel confirmed that ten of the dead were Jordanian, and the foreign ministry said a team from its Cairo embassy had traveled to Nuweiba to follow up on the wounded and arrange the return of bodies to Jordan.

Among the dead was Linda Arafat, a Jordanian woman married to a Palestinian from Gaza who had fled the enclave after war erupted in October 2023 and settled in Cairo with her three children, aged 10, 13 and 14. She had boarded the bus to visit her brother and relatives in Jordan, her cousin Muhammad Arafat told Sky News Arabia.

Her family's ordeal reflects the wider toll of the conflict: her father was killed while trapped at Nasser Hospital in Gaza during military operations after traveling there to visit her before the war, her cousin said. Her mother, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, was extracted from Gaza to Egypt and now remains there with another daughter, unable to return to Jordan.

Linda's husband, who holds a Gaza-issued Palestinian travel document, is currently in Ramallah and cannot enter Jordan; her children hold similar documents and are likewise barred from the kingdom. Her cousin appealed to Jordanian authorities to allow the husband to travel through Jordan to Cairo so he can be reunited with his children after their mother's death. Linda was buried in a family plot in Egypt.

The accident underscores a persistent problem in Egypt, where road crashes killed about 6,000 people last year, according to the state statistics agency.