“It feels like the longest week of my life,” Steve Zind said Thursday, some five days after a brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers sparked the most devastating fighting in the region in decades.
Zind, a retired reporter and host for Vermont Public, said his sister, Barbara Zind, was in the Gaza Strip when the fighting started, and she hasn’t been able to leave since. It’s still not clear how she will, Steve said, given that Israel has further cut off the narrow piece of Palestinian land governed by Hamas and appears to be preparing for a ground invasion.
“Whenever you go to Gaza, you always know that there is danger and violence while you’re there,” Barbara said Tuesday in a live TV interview with CNN as explosions took place around her. “But, no, I wasn’t prepared for this.”
Barbara, a retired pediatrician from Colorado, was in Gaza to volunteer with the nonprofit Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which provides free medical care to injured and sick kids who are unable to access health care through the local hospital system.
Volunteering with the organization has taken Barbara to several Middle Eastern countries over the past decade, typically for weeks at a time, her brother said. The fund recently highlighted her work assessing 32 kids in southern Lebanon, writing that “her expertise continues to significantly impact the lives of these children.”
According to Steve, his sister was walking along a Gaza beach with a colleague last Saturday when they saw Hamas missiles fly overhead, followed by rockets launched from Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Barbara took shelter in her hotel for several days, Steve said, doing her best to stay indoors and away from windows.
Her brother said he and other family members were most frightened for his sister’s safety in the first few days after fighting broke out.
The family struggled to get substantive information on what was happening in Gaza from U.S. government officials, Steve said, and he worried no one in an official capacity even knew where his sister was. He said that when he called the U.S. Department of State for the first time, an official told him all he could do was fill out a form.
“It was frustrating,” he said.
As the week went on, though, his family started feeling more comfortable — or, at least, as comfortable as they could — with her situation. That’s in large part because she was able to make it to a United Nations compound in Gaza City, Steve said, along with about 250 other humanitarian workers, many of them doctors in a similar position as her.
The family has also been in regular communication with Barbara over the messaging app WhatsApp.
On her end, Barbara has been in touch with the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in an effort to secure the visa she would need to leave Gaza for Egypt across the Rafah Border Crossing. It’s almost certainly the only option she has right now, Steve said, though he could not say when it would be possible, much less safe, for her to try to cross.
Rafah, which is Gaza’s only functioning crossing with Egypt and the only way out of the strip, has been struck repeatedly by the Israeli military this week, The Washington Post reported. Israel has also closed the sole pedestrian pathway into its country.
U.S. officials have been in talks with countries including Egypt and Israel over setting up a humanitarian corridor for Americans and other civilians out of Gaza, CNN reported Wednesday. While the corridor could also be used to allow supplies into Gaza, Egypt has resisted the idea of allowing refugees fleeing the strip, a U.S. official told CNN.
Meanwhile, Israel has pledged to allow nothing into Gaza until Hamas releases some 150 hostages the group took during its attack last weekend, which killed hundreds of Israelis, according to the Associated Press. Israel is also reportedly preparing for a ground invasion of Gaza, as the death toll has continued to climb on both sides.
At least half the challenge for Barbara, Steve said, would be getting to the Egyptian border from Gaza City — a nearly hourlong trip “through a warzone.” Still, he said that he and his family are far more worried about the millions of Gazans who would remain, including the people whom Barbara was there to help.
“We feel very optimistic about her prospects,” Steve said, but “I think we’re all concerned about the prospects for people who don’t have the options that she as an American citizen does — who have no resources or options to leave Gaza.”
He noted that one of Colorado’s U.S. senators has also been in touch with his family this week.
“My sister’s fortunate, which is an odd thing to say given the situation she’s in,” he said.
Asked about the local response to the conflict, Steve said he was “heartened” by comments made by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., which in his view “really emphasized the human rights of those living in Gaza and the importance of our doing whatever we can to make sure that Israel’s response isn’t in violation of those rights.”
Sanders condemned violence on both sides in his statement on Wednesday while urging Israeli forces to exercise restraint.
“For many, it is no secret that Gaza has been an open-air prison, with millions of people struggling to secure basic necessities,” the senator said. “Hamas’ terrorism will make it much more difficult to address that tragic reality and will embolden extremists on both sides, continuing the cycle of violence.”
