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Loay Elbasyouni “gave up hope many times” that his parents would escape Gaza City. Here’s how he saved them.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears set to defy warnings from the United States and many other countries and organizations by ordering his forces to move into the southern Gaza city of Rafah. More than 1.5 million Palestinians — many of them displaced multiple times already during four months of war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers — have crammed into Rafah, on Israel’s orders.
But not all of Gaza’s civilians fled to the south. Some of them simply couldn’t.
Mohammed and Alia Elbasyouni stayed in Gaza City, the biggest metropolis in the Palestinian territory, during four months of bombardment despite the Israel Defense Forces’ order to evacuate.
They stayed put, they told CBS News, because they were too elderly to leave on foot with the thousands of others who sought safety in southern Gaza.
The couple’s son Loay is a U.S. citizen who lives in Los Angeles and helped design a robotic helicopter for NASA that was used on a Mars mission. He said his parents were among the last five civilians stuck in the old center of Gaza City, and being so far away, with them trapped in a warzone, was torture.
“They had almost no food. They had no water. My mom wasn’t drinking and trying to save water for my dad,” he told us. “My dad had a heart condition. There was nobody to help him. He couldn’t breathe. My mom thought he was dying.”
“Death was every moment,” Alia told CBS News. “We were living in stress and indescribable fear. Shelling 24 hours a day over our heads. Scared, and we couldn’t do anything, and you hear screaming all the time.”
Loay was convinced that his parents would never make it out of the decimated Gaza Strip, but the electrical engineer didn’t stop looking for an escape route.
“I started working on it after the third day of the war,” he said, “speaking to probably hundreds of people, trying a lot of avenues, you know, and like, almost every single avenue failed.”
He said it was made far more complicated by the fact that his parents cannot walk on their own, “so I had to figure out a way to send an ambulance to them, to pick them up from Gaza City and get them to Rafah.”
“I gave up hope many times,” he admitted, but he said every day he would wake up and think, “let me try one more avenue.”
Eventually his tireless efforts paid off, and with help from Turkish authorities, Loay arranged for his parents to be ferried out of Gaza City in an ambulance convoy to make the roughly 20-mile journey south to Rafah — the only place in Gaza with a border crossing that’s been open at all since the war started.
On a first attempt, the family said the convoy came under fire.
“It was an ambulance convoy of the three ambulances and a bus,” Loay said. His parents were in the second or the third ambulance, and after they were collected by the Palestinian Red Crescent team, “they were attacked.”
It was never clear who opened fire, but Loay’s parents said one medic was killed and at least two other people injured. With no other option, however, they tried again, and the second time they made it to Rafah. His parents crossed the border into Egypt, and then Loay was finally reunited with them in Turkey, where they all spoke with CBS News.
Alia said being back together with her son was “indescribable — but I am sad for our people. We are happy, but also not happy because we left our families without even seeing them — our family, friends, our country is in total ruin.”
Now, with the threat of a looming Israeli ground assault like the one they escaped from in Gaza City, the elderly couple worry about those friends and family they left behind in Rafah.
If there is an invasion, Mohammed told CBS News, “a large number of civilians will die. A large number will be wounded.”
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Pennsylvania officials say “bad-faith mass challenges” target more than 3,500 voters
If the election in Pennsylvania is close, new challenges made to over 3,500 voters, many of whom live overseas and cast ballots by mail, could prove to be a pivotal part of the effort to undermine confidence in the 2024 election.
“Throughout the day Friday, several bad-faith mass challenges were filed in a coordinated effort in counties across the Commonwealth to question the qualifications of thousands of registered Pennsylvania voters who applied to vote by mail ballot,” the Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement.
Most of the voters are individuals who live overseas and vote absentee under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a federal law that has allowed certain citizens living overseas to vote since 1986. This group of voters includes active military members, people who work abroad, and expats.
Additional challenges were filed questioning voters’ residency because they had a permanent mail forwarding address with the U.S. Postal Service.
“These challenges are based on theories that courts have repeatedly rejected,” the Pennsylvania Department of State said.
Josh Maxwell, chair of the Board of Commissioners in Chester County, said the elections office received hundreds of challenges from activists in his community based off USPS mail forwarding data. He believes the effort was made in an effort to deprive legitimate voters their right to vote.
“It’s about disenfranchising voters in a swing state and overturning the outcome of an election,” he said.
Many of these challenges arise from activists associated with organizations that say they focus on election integrity. In Chester County, the activist challenging votes claimed to be affiliated with the group PA Fair Elections in a video hearing last week. PA Fair Elections is part of a broader national initiative to scrutinize voter registrations and ballots, according to the progressive watchdog group Documented.
According to a report released to CBS News by Documented, PA Fair Elections is run by Heather Honey, an activist whose organization is known for her work to change elections procedures around the country.
Honey is the head of the Election Research Institute, and was involved in the controversial petition to the Georgia State Elections Board that would have made it easier for county boards to block the certification of elections, according to ProPublica. The rule has since been blocked by a Fulton County judge. Honey denies involvement in pushing the Georgia rule.
“Heather Honey is working as part of a well funded, nationally organized effort to manufacture election conspiracy theories, drum up thinly-sourced voter challenges and call the results into requisition when MAGA Republicans lose,” said Brendan Fisher, Documented’s deputy executive director.
PA Fair Elections denied any involvement in voter challenges in an email to CBS News. Heather Honey did not respond to a request for comment as of publication.
Aside from activist groups, several of the challenges to individual voters came from Republican State Senator Jarrett Coleman, who submitted challenges in Bucks and Lehigh Counties. The letter also says he submitted a $10 fee per voter challenge as required. Coleman’s office did not respond to CBS News for comment.
Now, counties with challenged voters must hold a hearing before the certification deadline on Nov. 12 about the status of these voters, which legal groups say is cause for concern. The ACLU sent an email to 67 county solicitors in Pennsylvania asking the officials to throw out the challenges to both groups of voters.
“Counties should formally dismiss or deny the challenges as quickly as possible to minimize any delay or disruption to the canvassing process,” the ACLU letter stated.
Both York and Chester counties have already rejected all the challenges.
Concern over overseas absentee voting has been amplified by former President Donald Trump, who posted on Truth Social in September that Democrats “are getting ready to CHEAT! They are going to use UOCAVA [Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act]
to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever.”
Overseas absentee voting has become a rallying cry for self-described “election integrity” activists who claim individuals living overseas could be submitting fraudulent voter information. In the last few weeks, two lawsuits about overseas absentee voting have been thrown out in North Carolina and Michigan.
With the Pennsylvania challenges, election boards are the arbitrators, not judges.
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