The mother and uncle of a US service member were safe outside of Gaza after being rescued from the fighting in a secret operation on New Year’s Eve, according to The Associated Press.
The report, which cited an unnamed US official, said it is the only known operation of its kind to extract American citizens and their close family members during the months of devastating ground fighting and Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Others who have made it out of Gaza through the Rafah crossing into Egypt fled south in the initial weeks of the war.
Zahra Sckak, 44, made it out of Gaza, along with her brother-in-law, Farid Sukaik, an American citizen, a US official told the US agency. Sckak’s husband, Abedalla Sckak, was shot earlier in the Israel-Hamas war as the family fled from a building hit by an airstrike. He died days later. One of her three American sons, Spec. Ragi A. Sckak, 24, serves as an infantryman in the US military.
The extraction, coordinated by the US, Israel, Egypt and others, involved the Israeli military and local Israeli officials who oversee Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the US agency reported. There was no indication that American officials were on the ground in Gaza. “The United States played solely a liaison and coordinating role between the Sckak family and the governments of Israel and Egypt,” the official said.
‘Drank water from Sewers’
A family member and US-based lawyers and advocates working on the family’s behalf had said that Sckak and Sukaik were struck in a building surrounded by combatants, with little or no food and only water from sewers to drink. There were few immediate details of the on-the-ground operation. It took place after extended appeals from Sckak’s family and US-based citizens groups for help from Congress members and the Biden administration.
The US State Department has said some 300 American citizens, legal permanent residents and their immediate family members remain in Gaza, at risk from ground fighting, airstrikes and widening starvation and thirst in the besieged territory. Those still left in the territory face a dangerous and sometimes impossible trip to Egypt’s border crossing out of Gaza, and a bureaucratic struggle for US, Egyptian and Israeli approval to get themselves, their parents and young children out of Gaza.
(With agency inputs)
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