The Associated Press reports:

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,” 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 militants in Gaza.

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

Gaza’s Health Ministry has reported more than 20,000 deaths in the fighting and more than 53,600 wounded. According to the United Nations, more than a half-million people are starving in Gaza because of the war.

Fadi Sckak’s mother was on her sixth day with only water from the sewers to drink and with little or no food and rescue hopes waning, he said. 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 said.

Their son had 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 said. [Continue reading…]