Gili Nir landed at the airport in Antalya, Turkey, with one small bag and a warm winter coat. Tomorrow morning he will board a flight to Adana, a Turkish city on the outskirts of the area most severely affected by Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake which killed thousands of people in Turkey and Syria. Once he arrives, Nir’s plan is to figure out what locals’ needs are and how he can help. The 40-year-old Israeli is not affiliated with any organization or official aid delegation; he defines himself as a “humanitarian free agent.”
“I’ve been doing this for years through various organizations and nonprofits,” Nir said. “I was in Ukraine, and the first thing I learned is that you have to get people out, so I rented big cars and hotel rooms and got the civilians out of the war zone. After that I moved on to dealing with emotional support, directing humanitarian aid. I’m a helping hand wherever it’s needed.”
Nir’s flight from Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport to Antalya was entirely full. Antalya is about a 10 hour drive from the earthquake’s epicenter. In recent years its airport has become a common transfer point for flights of Israelis on their way to vacation destinations in Turkey and beyond, but this flight included 10 Israelis on their way to assist in relief efforts.
Among them were two men in their 40s who looked as though they had come from an elite commando unit, but were in fact rescue workers employed by the Harel insurance company. The two men, laden with rescue equipment, requested that their names not be published. They explained that all Harel insurance holders who were in Turkey at the time of the earthquake had made contact and were not in need of assistance.
The company decided to still send the two of them to assist Turkish NGOs that they have worked with for years. Together they will provide aid to Turkish citizens in remote areas that larger delegations cannot reach. “We don’t know yet where we’ll be,” they said. “We’ll join up with locals and we’ll see where they take us.”
Another group of 20-somethings landed in Antalya on their way to the Turkish capital of Ankara, from which they planned to head into the field. They are volunteers with the international humanitarian aid organization House of Hope, and in the past year they’ve mainly worked in Ukraine. One of them is a German who traveled through Israel on his way from Bangladesh, the others are Israelis.
This article was translated from Hebrew by Sam Edelman.
