Northwestern law student sues State Department seeking family’s safe return from Gaza: ‘My pleas are falling on deaf ears.’

In a past life, Yasmeen Elagha’s visits to Khan Yunis, the largest city in southern Gaza, were marked by platters of knafah gazawiya, a nutty dessert made with semolina soaked in a sweet syrup, and late nights with her enormous extended family across homes east of the Mediterranean Sea. She doesn’t know if that’ll ever happen again.

“All of my relatives are displaced, crammed into hospitals, on the streets,” said Elagha, a 27-year-old Palestinian American law student at Northwestern University. “It’s my home, it’s my culture, it’s everything that is love to me. It’s so horrifying what’s happening.”

While President Joe Biden’s administration evacuated thousands of Israeli Americans on charter flights and ships almost as soon as the crisis in Gaza intensified on Oct. 7, Elagha watched cellphone footage of destroyed buildings in her grandparents’ neighborhood in Khan Yunis, where her family members remain trapped, including two cousins who are American citizens.

In a lawsuit filed in December, Elagha, of Oakbrook Terrace, is accusing the U.S. State Department of denying her Palestinian American family equal protection under the Constitution and urging the government to evacuate the Americans trapped in Gaza.

“I think the U.S. government is showing that when Palestinians and Israelis are both American, it will always save the Israeli lives and it will always leave the Palestinian lives for dead,” Elagha said. “And the more I’ve gone through the process (of trying to help family members evacuate), the more I’ve realized that the U.S. truly has voluntarily removed itself from any kind of assistance for Palestinians.”

Elagha’s cousins Borak Alagha, 18, and Hashem Alagha, 20, are U.S. citizens who were born in America but have lived in Gaza since 2011. They were studying engineering at the Islamic University of Gaza until Israel’s bombardment uprooted their lives.

They fled their home several weeks ago and live in a shelter with their parents, siblings and grandparents in a neighborhood in Khan Yunis called Al-Mawasi. The shelter has two bedrooms, one bathroom and more than 30 people, Elagha said.

“It makes me feel absolutely powerless because I’m doing everything that I can as an American,” Elagha said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t have any power. I don’t have any way to get to them.”

Maria Kari, Elagha’s lawyer, said the State Department cleared Borak and Hashem Alagha and eight family members who are not U.S. citizens to cross the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. But Kari said the U.S. had not yet added their names to the exit list, which would grant them access to evacuate.

“The lawsuit is active, it’s alive, but we have hit a roadblock in the sense that the State Department couldn’t care less about the Americans still on the ground,” Kari said. “It boils down to the disparate, differential treatment that we’ve been seeing from the start.”

Khan Yunis is north of the Rafah crossing, one of the only links between Gaza and the outside world. It’s controlled and operated by Egyptian authorities. It’s the only Gaza crossing not controlled by Israel.

Elagha, who last visited Gaza in December 2022, detailed the arduous experience of traversing the border when traveling to the West Bank from the United States. “It’s a very long and tedious, degrading process,” Elagha said.

Since no planes fly directly into Gaza or the West Bank, travelers typically fly into neighboring countries and enter through one of the three border crossings. Elagha’s family flies into Cairo, Egypt, where her grandmother lives, and takes a bus toward the Gaza Strip to enter through the Rafah crossing.

But it isn’t straightforward, Elagha said, adding that authorities often search belongings in the middle of the night. People can also be denied entry without a reason if the official decides not to let someone cross, she said. And sometimes, there isn’t even a border agent present.

On Monday, Elagha’s family members were trying to cross into Egypt, but there was no agent on the Palestinian side to grant them entry into the Egyptian side. Elagha said she was communicating with them through WhatsApp for a play-by-play of the risky excursion.

“They waited for hours and hours and hours, and then they just had to leave because when nighttime hits, it is when the airstrikes intensify,” Elagha said. “So they needed to return to the shelter. … They couldn’t sit there waiting any longer in the cold.”

Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 attack — in which Hamas killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240 in Israel — has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Nearly 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced. And according to a report from the United Nations and other agencies, more than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving.

Callie Maidhof, a sociocultural anthropologist and professor of Global Studies at the University of Chicago, said calling the events in Gaza a “war” is highly problematic.

“To say that it’s a war implies that we’ve got two states, even if one might be a disorganized or failed state,” Maidhof said. “Like there’s some sort of separation between the two, when in fact, Gaza has not been outside of the control of Israel since 1967.”

Maidhof, who spent nearly three years living in Israel and last visited in March 2023, said Americans visiting Israel don’t face the same travel restrictions as Palestinian Americans visiting Gaza or the West Bank, which results in an evacuation system that is virtually nonexistent for the latter.

“You have people (from Israel) who are able to just come here just to come here, to escape the stress of war,” Maidhof said. “I know people who have come and lived with American family members or have stayed with Mexican family members for a few weeks because it is scary and stressful. There is of course a very substantial difference between scary and stressful, and famine and large-scale destruction.”

In October, 10 members of Elagha’s extended family who ranged in age from 1 to 62, were killed in a single airstrike that hit their home, she said. More recently, an airstrike severely injured one of her paternal uncles. And right at the beginning of the new year, Borak ran into an open electric wire and electrocuted his face as he attempted to flee from yet another Israeli airstrike in the dark, Elagha said.

“When I think about the way that the rest of the world lives, it just feels so dystopian that some people are getting electrocuted in the face and injured by airstrikes and others are clinking their glasses into a new year,” Elagha said. “Every time I get a text message from my aunt or a text message from my cousins, I never know if that’s going to be the message that lets me know that something really, really, really bad has happened.”

To get her family to the States, Elagha has given several interviews to news outlets and organizations, with some sit-downs going on for several hours.

“This issue is my whole identity, so when they ask and ask and ask, I answer, but I don’t always feel that people are listening,” Elagha said. “I wish people listened.”

She said at the start of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, her immediate family had hoped that because her cousins are American citizens, it was only a matter of time until they returned home safely.

At last count, Elagha said she’s contacted the State Department more than 30 times, including 15 emails to officials who handle evacuations. She said she’s called the State Department emergency hotline seven times, spoken with a representative at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem at least five times, and spoken with a State Department official to plead for the safe return of her family members. She’s also contacted her congressional representative to no avail.

“My pleas are falling on deaf ears. I have only received words of condolence and platitudes followed up with no action,” Elagha said.

The State Department has not responded to the Tribune’s requests for comment.

Elagha, born and raised in the Chicago area, said her connection to Gaza is indescribable. Whenever her family visits the region, she hears passersby on the streets, saying, “Oh, those are the Elagha girls from America.”

The Elaghas, a far-flung family in the hundreds, are one of the original families in Khan Yunis, dating back to the 1500s during the reign of the Ottoman Empire, she said. The family home, now in ruins and rubble, was in the same area as Qalaat Barquq, a 14th-century Ottoman castle.

Elagha said when the outside world sees images of Gaza, they see “danger” or a “war zone,” but to her it will always be home.

“The Gaza that I know is safe and it is beautiful,” she said. “Right now I have to savor the memories and hang on to the messages from my family, because I don’t know at what point I’ll stop hearing from them.”

zsyed@chicagotribune.com