‘I just want to see my mother again’: Americans beg for help getting family out of Gaza

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 mother again, that’s the goal,” says 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 US soldier serving in South Korea. “Being able to hold her again. I can’t bear to lose her.”

His mother, Zahra Sckak, 44, is holed up 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 the Hamas terror group in Gaza.

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

Fadi Sckak’s mother is on her sixth day with only water from the sewers to drink and with little or no food and rescue hopes waning, he says. His dad, Abedalla, was shot and wounded last month, after a bombing forced the family to flee the building where they had been sheltering, and died days later without treatment, he claims.

Their son listened over the phone as his mother begged for help after the shooting. He could hear his 56-year-old father, who had diabetes and corresponding health problems, in the background, crying out in pain.

“He didn’t deserve a painful experience like that. To die, with no help, no one even trying to help,” Sckak says.

Some US 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 names provided by the US government that would authorize them to leave Gaza.

The State Department said yesterday that it has helped more than 1,300 people who were eligible for US 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 US help to escape; that includes what it says are fewer than 50 US citizens.

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