‘Every time I talk to them, it’s like the last call’: anguish of Palestinian Americans
Since coming to the US, Loay Elbasyouni has built a remote-controlled helicopter he can fly on Mars, but he can’t contact his elderly parents in northern Gaza.
“I’m in a big state of frustration,” said the Nasa engineer, who lives in the Los Angeles area. “I heard from them on the first day of the war and they were close to the bombing. Then nothing for seven days.”
When Elbasyouni reached his parents again on Sunday, they were OK but had no food or water and were under Israeli evacuation orders.
“They have nowhere to go,” Elbasyouni said, of Alya and Mohammed elBasyouni, both in their 70s. “Every time
I talk to them, it’s like the last call. ‘If we die, do this. If we die, remember us like this.’ They say that every time. They don’t know if they’ll be alive from one minute to the next.”
After 12 days of Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza in response to the cross-border Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis, Elbasyouni shares a predicament with many Palestinian Americans whose families are in the territory.
Concerns include an expected Israeli land invasion, a humanitarian catastrophe, Jordan warning of an “abyss” in the Middle East, and stalled diplomatic efforts to allow aid into Gaza or for dual nationals – like Elbasyouni’s Palestinian German parents – to be allowed out.
Politicians on all sides, Elbasyouni fears, are “intensifying the war, and preparing the methods, without thinking of the circumstances of all these people. They’re banging the war drums and hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are paying the price. It’s really stressing.”
Nagi Latefa, a 58-year-old Palestinian American engineer from Allentown, Pennsylvania, lost his cousin Shehda Abu Latefa last week in an F-16 strike on Khan Younis.
Latefa is receiving periodic messages about his 83-year-old mother,