Boston attorney reflects on month-long effort to get local family out of Gaza
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“This should be an easy fix.”
That’s how Boston attorney Sammy S. Nabulsi comforted himself after the initial shock wore off upon learning in a call from his wife on the morning of Oct. 11 that their friends, Abood Okal and Wafaa Abuzayda, and their 1-year-old son, Yousef, had the extreme misfortune to be in northern Gaza. The trio was attending an oft-rescheduled family reunion when Hamas launched its attack on Israel and Israel began its forceful response.
After all, Okal and Abuzayda were American citizens and Massachusetts residents, Nabulsi reasoned, and he had seen the orderly evacuation of American citizens who had been in Israel on hourly chartered flights from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv or on cruise ships from the port of Haifa to Cyprus.
But the real estate associate at Boston’s Rose Law Partners quickly realized that it was a far different story for untold numbers of American citizens stuck in Gaza.
“Everyone I spoke to that morning had no clue that this was, in fact, an issue,” he says.
Nabulsi first asked colleague Alan D. Rose if he knew anyone in Washington, D.C., who might be able to help. Rose put him in touch with Robert C. Barber, who joined Prince, Lobel, Tye after serving for two years as the Obama administration’s ambassador to Iceland.
Barber, in turn, helped Nabulsi get on the radar of Tristan Takos, constituent services director for U.S. Sen. Ed Markey. By the following morning, Nabulsi had connected with senior officials at the White House, National Security Council and State Department, along with staff in the offices of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Jim McGovern. What Nabulsi describes as a “multifaceted pressure campaign” was underway.
As Rose recalls, Takos urged Nabulsi, “Get as much publicity surrounding this problem as you possibly can.”
It was an unnatural role for a lawyer whose zoning, land use and environmental matters are not typically front-page news. But Nabulsi soon found himself on the phone with a Boston Globe reporter. Then, he coordinated a call in the wee hours of Thursday morning between Abuzayda and NPR reporter Leila Fadel.
“We used that as a launchpad for a larger media pressure campaign,” Nabulsi says.
Using the press contacts he got through connections in Boston city government, Nabulsi reached out to interview bookers at CNN, ABC News, MSNBC and FOX News. Soon, Nabulsi’s Boston office was doubling as a TV studio for interviews with anyone willing to help Nabulsi keep Okal and Abuzayda’s names in the news.
Nabulsi says what motivated him was the sense he got that no one else was there for them — and he saw himself in them.
“I’m Arab-American with a U.S. passport and U.S. citizenship,” he says. “I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘It seems like the government’s not going to have my back if I were ever to get into a bind overseas.’”
At the time of the NPR interview, Israeli airstrikes had already begun, and Abuzayda described how she was trying to shield her young child from the reality of what was happening nearby. Every time there was an explosion, she would don a big smile and clap, as if she were celebrating fireworks, she told Fadel.
However, once they got down to the south of Gaza, an airstrike 150 meters away shattered the walls of the home in which they were sheltering and blew out a couple of the windows.
“They weren’t able to put on the act at that point,” Nabulsi says.
The family also eventually ran out of milk. Abuzayda tried to give her son the little water they had, hoping that would stave off his hunger. But the child cried inconsolably.
“That was the hardest part for them, and it was the hardest part for me to listen to,” says Nabulsi, a parent himself.
Making the experience even more gut wrenching was that there were four occasions on which the State Department gave the family every indication that the border crossing into Egypt would be opening imminently, only to have their hopes dashed after six to eight hours of waiting.
A particularly excruciating scenario unfolded over the weekend of Oct. 21 and 22. On Saturday, Nabulsi received a message from a State Department official telling him that the crossing was going to open at 7 a.m. the next day.
Right up until the moment of truth, the conversation in the WhatsApp group chat among the family, Nabulsi and the State Department official made it seem like the end was finally near.
“I hope you’re there. Crossing’s opening in 10 minutes,” the State Department official messaged.
Nabulsi stayed up all night in his home office, checking in for updates every 20 to 30 minutes, a wait that ended in frustration.
A dispirited Nabulsi started to feel like he had little choice but to shift the focus of his efforts from getting his friends out of Gaza to trying to keep them safe from Israeli airstrikes until a plan could be devised.
Real progress finally began on Monday, Oct. 30. Nabulsi got his first glimmer of hope from a Lebanese general with whom he had been communicating who had a direct line of communication with Hamas.
On Oct. 31, Nabulsi woke up and saw a tweet from a Cairo-based news outlet that Egypt had agreed to accept injured Palestinian civilians, which lined up with what the Lebanese general had told him had been a sticking point before Hamas would allow foreign nationals to leave Gaza.
Finally, on the evening of Nov. 1, Nabulsi got the news he was hoping for. Okal and Abuzayda’s names appeared on the daily list the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Customs Authority had begun publishing on Facebook.
The family reached the crossing before 7 a.m. on Nov. 2 and crossed into Egypt at 11:30 a.m. local time. By Monday, Nov. 6, they were back in Boston.
Reflecting on his experience helping Okal and Abuzayda, Nabulsi notes that, for him, none of his motivation was political.
Nabulsi says he does not consider himself expert enough to opine on the larger conflict but does have views on whether the U.S. government should have prioritized American citizens as it responded to the situation in Gaza.
“It should have been the first question we asked before we waded into the conflict at all,” he says. “Do we have people in Gaza, and how do we get them out? And that didn’t happen.”
Nabulsi says he’s distressed with the state of U.S. discourse around the war in Gaza, including in the legal field.
“I don’t understand why people are losing jobs,” he says. “People are being doxxed. I also don’t understand why people are tearing posters down, why people are fighting physically. I don’t understand any of that.”
He knows personally it does not need to be this way. Early on in his efforts, Nabulsi received a call from a well-known Boston attorney who is Jewish and a Zionist, whom he declines to name.
According to Nabulsi, the attorney said, “I know that you and I probably don’t see eye to eye on the politics, but I want to help you with getting these people out.”
Overwhelmed and out of his element, Nabulsi took the attorney up on his offer.
Nabulsi says they spoke every night and texted all day and even cried with each other on the phone. The other attorney was a source of strength, feedback and ideas, he says.
“For whatever reason, we were able to have this safe space and have constructive discourse about our views and not want to go after one another,” he says. “I’m not calling for him to be fired; he’s not calling for me to be fired or for clients not to work with me. None of that. We respect each other and each other’s views, and at bottom we found something that meant something to both of us.”
Nabulsi hopes that, at some point, the attorney shares his side of the same story.
“I think it’s important for people to hear,” he says.
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