'Happy to be home': Canadians fleeing Israel-Hamas war arrive in Toronto

Some of the first Canadians fleeing the Israel-Hamas war arrived in Toronto Friday night.

“The horror of what occurred there is affecting everyone and the raining of rockets and the trauma that kids are experiencing… it's just a really sad, difficult time,” Kinneret Butterfield-Morrison told reporters at Toronto Pearson International Airport.

Butterfield-Morrison is one of an estimated 281 Canadian citizens who left Israel Thursday on one of two Canadian Armed Forces evacuation flights following a surprise attack by Hamas last week that left more than 1,300 Israelis dead.

She said she was staying with her aunt in Rehovot, about 30 kilometres southeast of Tel Aviv, when she woke up to air raid sirens.

“Despite being in Israel many times in my life, I'd actually never been there during something like that. So I was a bit confused. And then my aunt sort of came in to the room and said, ‘We gotta go right now.’”

The Toronto resident was in Israel with her brothers and father to mark the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death.

"We've all had very little sleep, but we're super happy to be home," she said.

Her brother, Yaron Butterfield, also spoke at Pearson and said arriving in Canada felt “surreal.”

“A part of me feels like I’m just back in the car, rushing from the apartment to the airport, wondering if I'm going to get hit by a bomb,” he said.

“It wasn't until we got to Ben Gurion Airport and saw the Canadian flags that suddenly my stress went down.”

Another passenger on the flight out of Israel by way of Greece was Khalid Karomi, a Syriac Catholic priest from Cambridge, Ont., who said he was leading a pilgrimage of 40 people to the Holy Land when the war broke out.

“Thank God, we are saved because we arrived by the first airplane from Tel Aviv to Athens…we are very lucky,” he told reporters at Pearson.

Ottawa announced the evacuation flights earlier this week after widespread commercial airline cancellations in the region and a flood of calls from stranded Canadian citizens to consular officials.

The federal government said Thursday that of the roughly 5,700 Canadians registered in Israel, 1,600 people had expressed interest in potentially seeking assistance departing.

At least three Canadians have been killed since the violence erupted on Oct. 7, including two Canadian men who were killed by Hamas gunmen at a music festival and an Israeli-Canadian mother who was killed in her kibbutz, a communal farming settlement.

“Jews haven't experienced this since the Holocaust. And this is a major massacre and the stories every day, the stories of the people missing and the people who lost their lives is heart wrenching. It is. I just… I can't even describe,” Butterfield-Morrison said.

Israel has continued its bombardment of the Gaza Strip in retaliation for last Saturday’s attack and on Friday issued an evacuation order to some 1 million residents in the region ahead of a looming ground offensive.

Roughly 1,800 people have been killed in Gaza as of the seventh day of the war, according to the health ministry for the territory.

There are some 150 Canadians in the Hamas-controlled area, but without a humanitarian corridor in the region, airlifts are not currently possible.

Meanwhile, Ya'ara Saks, minister of mental health and addictions, was at Pearson Airport Friday and said the evacuation flights out of Tel Aviv will continue “as long as there is a demand to do so.”