Americans beg for help getting family out of Gaza

WASHINGTON — Fadi Sckak has already lost his father to the violence in Gaza. He wants to help his mother escape that fate.

“I just want to see my mom again, that's the goal,” said Sckak, a college student in Sunnyvale, California. The 25-year-old is one of the Palestinian couple's three American sons, including an active-duty American soldier serving in South Korea. “Being able to hold her again. I can't bear to lose her.”

His mother, Zahra Sckak, 44, was locked in a building in Gaza City along with 100 others on Saturday with an elderly, sick American relative. According to the State Department, she is among 300 U.S. citizens, permanent legal residents or their parents and young children still trapped in the fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza.

Family members in the United States and other advocates are calling for the Biden administration and Congress to help them flee.

Gaza's health ministry has reported more than 20,000 deaths in the fighting and more than 53,600 injuries. According to the United Nations, more than half a million people in Gaza are suffering from hunger as a result of the war.

Fadi Sckak's mother had only sewage water to drink and little or no food on her sixth day, and hopes of rescue dwindled, he said. His father, Abedalla, was shot and wounded last month after a bombing forced the family to flee the building where they had taken shelter, and died days later without treatment, he said.

Their son had listened on the phone as his mother begged for help after the shooting. He heard his 56-year-old father, who had diabetes and associated health problems, screaming in pain in the background.

'He didn't deserve such a painful experience. To die, without help, without anyone even trying to help,” Sckak said.

Some U.S. citizens and legal residents and their immediate families have been stranded near Gaza's Rafah border crossing into Egypt, desperately waiting to be placed on a list of names provided by the U.S. government that would authorize them to leave Gaza.

Others, like Zahra Schkak, are trapped by fighting, and some are too sick or injured to make it across. They tell their families in voice messages and sporadic phone calls and text messages about danger, hunger and fear.

“This is the part of the rocket that fell on our heads yesterday,” 18-year-old American citizen Borak Alagha texted his cousin, Yasmeen Elagha, a law student in Chicago, sending a photo of him holding a pointed piece of metal .

“This is the hole next to where we live now,” Alagha said in another text. It showed a deep bomb crater next to their building near Khan Younis, where the family of 10 fled after Israeli officials identified the area as a safe place for civilians.

Yasmeen Elagha contacted Foreign Ministry officials and members of a special task force. She has filed a lawsuit to force the U.S. government to do more after hearing from U.S. officials that there is no more they can do at this time.

“They're completely leaving them for dead,” she said.

The State Department said Friday it has helped more than 1,300 people eligible for U.S. assistance — U.S. citizens, green card holders and their immediate family members — make it through the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. The department is tracking another 300 people who are still seeking U.S. help to escape; including what it says: less than 50 US citizens.

“American citizens and their families will make their own decisions and adjust their plans as this difficult situation changes,” the department said in a statement.

The case of Sckak's family in Gaza has received increased attention in Washington given 24-year-old Ragi Sckak's military service in South Korea.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said he pushed the administration to get Americans out of Gaza. “I know this is a top priority for the administration,” he said in a statement, adding that U.S. officials would “exhaust every option.”

Maria Kari is an immigration attorney in Houston working on behalf of stranded U.S. citizens and legal residents. She points to the air and sea charters the U.S. helped arrange to get more than a thousand Americans and others out of Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that started the war.

She has filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. government of failing to protect Americans in danger abroad and unconstitutionally denying Palestinian Americans the kind of assistance it has provided to Israeli Americans.

“We ask them not to do anything political here,” she said. “We're simply saying that the State Department has a job. And that is not the case for one class of citizens.”