When Hana and her 15-year-old daughter landed at Cairo International Airport in March 2016, they assumed they had arrived in the right place. On board a Yemen Airways plane coming from Aden, they had left behind a country sunken in a war that was starting to appear entrenched. The fate of their city, the contested Hodeidah, was not looking any better, leaving them in despair over a way out.

For many Yemenis who, like Hana and her daughter, decide to flee from their country and have enough resources to do so, Egypt seems as one of the best options. Cairo is one of the cheapest capitals in the Middle East, and Egypt still has a relatively open-door policy toward Yemenis: Those under 16 and those over 50 can enter the country without a visa, and for those in the middle, a medical report is enough to get it. Yemenis in Egypt also have access to public schools and health care on equal footing as the locals.

Although there are no official Egyptian figures, Baligh al-Mekhlafi, the information counselor at the Yemeni Embassy, told Al-Monitor that some 700,000 Yemenis reside in Egypt, a number with which two Yemeni organizations working in Cairo consulted by Al-Monitor agreed.

Other estimations by Fahd al-Ariki, the current chairman of the Yemeni Community Council in Egypt — a council of dignitaries linked to the Yemeni Embassy — reduce this number to some 300,000, on the basis that some Yemenis first land in Egypt but then leave for somewhere else. Before the war in Yemen, Mekhlafi said that the number was around 30,000.