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 el-Basyouni, 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, who uses a wheelchair, when his nieces and nephews are able to send messages from a hospital with internet access in southern Gaza.
“What’s happening is traumatizing, and my heart is bleeding and aching. It spins my mind to a place of dark and unimaginable horrors,” Latefa said, adding that any optimism “is now with God”.
Amid the breakdown in telecommunications, these emotions are shared by many Palestinian Americans. In north Paterson, New Jersey, an enclave of Palestinian, Turkish, Syrian and Jordanian residents, a three-block section of Main Street last year was renamed Palestine Way.
Amjad Abukwaik, the owner of a pharmacy on the main drag of Palestine Way, says he normally checks the English soccer scores in the mornings. During the past 10 days, he’s been looking for updates on his family in Gaza.
“It’s been a very tough time, and these people are going through hell,” Abukwaik said. “Communication has been very difficult,” he added, citing how the internet in Gaza is blocked and many people there cannot charge their phones. “The information we are looking for is, ‘Are you alive? Are you still there? Is the house still intact?’”
Abukwaik’s cousin has lost a son. Another cousin has lost three kids, while a cousin-in-law has lost 10 family members. A few have lost their homes. Tears fill Abukwaik’s eyes.
“I come to work but the fact is I can’t function. My mind is not here. I’m checking my phones, checking the news, looking for whatever information I can get,” he said.
Media reports say that al-Shifa, the main referral hospital for the Gaza Strip – and where Abukwaik was born 54 years ago – is running out of fuel to run its generators. Discussions of a political solution, Abukwaik says, are now secondary.
“The way I look at it is, will there be people left in Gaza to have a political solution? People are being displaced from their homes, being asked to go south, and then being bombed. It’s a genocide going on right now,” he said.
At least 3,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the Israel-Hamas war started on 7 October, according to the Gaza ministry of health on Tuesday. Abukwaik points out that this number probably doesn’t include people who have not been discovered under the rubble of destroyed buildings. The Israel Defense Forces say 600,000 people have left the Gaza City area. That leaves 100,000.
“When this is all over, the Israelis on the other side will still have schools and playgrounds to go to, a future to look forward to, the best colleges, a choice to remain in Israel or go to where they have come from. The people in Gaza, if they are not pushed into Egypt, will be a buffer zone,” Abukwaik said.
He rejects western pressure on neighboring Arab states to take Palestinian refugees.
“Are you fucking kidding me? We already lost our home in Lod [a city in Israel] … in 1948. And now we’re going to get pushed out of Gaza? They have to go through this nightmare again?” Abukwaik asked.
The Paterson deputy mayor, Raed Odeh, said someone had left a message at his business, the Palestine Salon, threatening to burn it down.
Odeh told the Guardian he was concerned for everyone imperiled by the war: “Everybody is upset and mad seeing all these innocent people dying. A lot of us are hoping that a ceasefire takes place after the president [Biden] goes there and we will not have to see any innocents dying on both sides. It’s enough.”
