Americans beg for help getting family out of Gaza

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

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

His mother, Zahra Sckak, 44, was holed up Saturday with an older, ailing American relative in a Gaza City building along with 100 others.

She is among what the State Department says are 300 American citizens, permanent legal residents or their parents and young children still trapped by the fighting between Israel and Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Relatives in the United States and other advocates are pleading for the Biden administration and Congress to help them flee.

Some U.S. citizens and legal residents and their immediate family are stranded near Gaza’s Rafah crossing into Egypt, desperately waiting for placement on a list of U.S.-government-provided names that would authorize them to leave Gaza.

Others, like Zahra Schkak, are trapped by fighting, and some are too ill or wounded to reach the crossing. They tell their families in voice messages and sporadic phone calls and texts of danger, hunger and fear.

Yasmeen Elagha has reached out to State Department officials and members of a special task force. She has sued to force the U.S. government to do more after hearing from American officials that there is noting more they can do at the moment.

The State Department said Friday it has helped more than 1,300 people who were eligible for U.S. assistance — American citizens, green-card holders and their immediate family members — make it through the Rafah crossing to Egypt. The department is tracking 300 more still seeking U.S. help to escape; that includes what it says are fewer than 50 U.S. citizens.

“U.S. 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 gotten more attention in Washington, given 24-year-old Ragi Sckak’s Army duty in South Korea.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said he has 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 lawyer in Houston working on behalf of the stranded American citizens and legal residents. She points to the air and sea charters that the U.S. helped arrange to bring out more than 1,000 Americans and others from Israel after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 that started the war.

She has filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. government of failing to protect Americans in danger abroad.