For Palestinian Americans stuck in Gaza, it’s a waiting game
It was Tuesday, three days after Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Israel in more than 50 years, slaughtering hundreds of civilians and sparking a ferocious Israeli response, that Nabil Al Shurafa realized that helping his mother leave Gaza was going to be a difficult task.
Until that morning, the American-born Al Shurafa, a 39-year-old medical researcher in Chicago, thought his 66-year-old mother, Naela, who became a naturalized US citizen in the late 1990s and is a 20-year resident of Camarillo, California, would be able to leave the enclave, despite the relentless Israeli bombing campaign.
“She’s a US citizen,” he said. “Everyone was saying, ‘No way would they keep US citizens here.’”
Hours earlier, his mother, who had been visiting Al Shurafa’s sick grandmother in Gaza since the beginning of the month, had made her way to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. There, she and dozens of other dual-passport holders hoped to escape before Israel’s anticipated ground incursion.
She received an exit stamp on the Palestinian side and was about to depart when four missiles landed in the no-man’s land between Gaza and Egypt, severing the last feasible escape route from the 40-kilometer-long Gaza Strip, which has long been under a strict blockade by both Egypt and Israel.
“She needed 10 minutes, that’s all, and she would have been out,” Al Shurafa said.
For an agonizing hour, he thought his mother was dead. But then she was able to call family members and told them she was returning to her family’s house in Gaza.
“She kept telling me, ‘Nabil, call your representatives. Call everyone. I have to get out,’” he said. “I knew then my woitrk was cut out for me.”
Al Shurafa’s mother is one of reportedly hundreds of Palestinian Americans stranded in Gaza, frantically seeking ways to leave amid an Israeli counteroffensive and siege that has left Gazans with no fuel or electricity and little water. Meanwhile, the death toll from Israel’s air attacks increases. On Sunday, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported 2,670 dead and 9,600 wounded.
For Al Shurafa, it has been a series of days and nights with little sleep, dialing embassies and consulates in the Middle East during his nighttime hours, and a frenetic series of daytime calls to the offices of senators, congressmen, and anyone else who might be able to help.
“It’s getting to the point where I have to ask her if she has enough food,” Al Shurafa said.
Israeli Americans also have found themselves stranded in Israel because of canceled flights and disruptions to travel from the ongoing conflict. But while the US embassy in Jerusalem has facilitated charter flights to European destinations and a ship transfer from the Port of Haifa to Cyprus, Palestinian Americans say they have received little guidance, even as the threat of an allout invasion in Gaza appears imminent.
“My brother, he’s now in Gaza, and he’s called the US embassy in Tel Aviv, in Cairo, everywhere,” said Mohammad Yaghi, a 60-year-old IT engineer and business owner in North Carolina. “They barely answer, and if they do, they tell him no one knows anything or to wait, or they just hang up.”
Yaghi once had a similar experience himself. In 2006, when Israel launched its offensive to retrieve IDF soldier Gilad Schalit, who was held hostage by Hamas, it took 11 days to be evacuated from Gaza, he said.
“We suffered back then with the embassy,” he said. “In general, they always handle Palestinian Americans like we’re third-class citizens; not even second class.”
US officials have told Palestinian Americans in Gaza to attempt to reach the Rafah border crossing. But that crossing, so far, has not been opened. Egypt, which usually keeps it sealed, claimed it did open it from its side but that the other side was being blocked by Hamas and as the result of Israel’s air campaign.
Egypt is generally reluctant to permit the entry of Palestinians because it fears a refugee crisis and also does not want to be seen as an accomplice to Israel’s forced displacement. But Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is under US pressure to allow Palestinian Americans and other foreign nationals through.
US officials have repeatedly insisted that American citizens, many stranded when US air carriers canceled flights, should sign up through a State Department Internet portal to indicate their desire to leave the region. US citizens are also routinely encouraged to sign up with a government website ahead of travel so that they can be contacted in case of emergency.
But it was only a few days ago that the option to register as a citizen in Gaza on crisis intake forms was even offered, Al Shurafa said.
“You’re the US government,” he said. “We’re supposed to be allies with Israel. You can’t tell them to just stop bombing for few hours and get our citizens out? Our own people are running from our allies.”
Such feelings of neglect have fed into a complicated attitude many Palestinian Americans have toward their adopted home and its Middle East policy. Many feel shunned because of the US government’s ongoing support for Israel, including some who immigrated to America before Israel was founded in 1948.
That feeling has only increased in the last eight days, said Jenan Kawash, a 32-yearold events producer and public-relations specialist in New York City, whose cousin is a US Green Card holder visiting Gaza and who also has two other relatives who are US citizens.
“There will never be a collective American effort to help Americans with hyphenated Arab identity, specifically a hyphenated Palestinian identity. That’s pretty clear,” she said, adding that she and other Palestinian Americans have taken to social media to raise awareness of what is happening in Gaza.
Though Kawash said she appreciated the freedoms afforded to her by being in the US, she nevertheless said it could never feel like home.
“I know that I have the ability to say these things; that my parents stayed quiet so as to assimilate,” she said. “But now we realize that the sense of safety is an illusion, so we have the willpower to be vocal about it.”