Medhat al-Rubei watched Israel’s assault on Gaza City from Cairo, Egypt — 200 miles down a blocked path.
A Gaza City native, Medhat is far from any of the homes he once envisioned.
Two years before a war tore his life apart, Medhat had an opportunity that few in Gaza are ever afforded: a chance to study in the United States, a place he dreamed of calling home.
Coming to the United States was remarkable. Even before Israel’s 2023 invasion of Gaza, Israel constricted Palestinians’ travel. But in 2022, the United States Department of State selected Medhat to participate in a program that invites exceptional students from around the world to study in the United States.
When Medhat left Gaza City that summer, he found a home in Cazenovia.
“At some point, I felt like I’m part of that place,” Medhat said. “I belong to that place.”
That sense of belonging no longer exists. The 19-year-old used to picture himself adjusting to his new college campus at an American university. Instead, Israel’s offensive on Gaza forced Medhat and his family in December 2023 to flee to Cairo, where they remain.
Half the world away, the Cazenovian woman who first opened her home to Medhat continues trying to help him build a new life.
Pat Carmeli took Medhat in when his original host family backed out just before his American studies began. An Israeli citizen and longtime activist for Palestinian rights, Pat believed she was better positioned than anyone else in Cazenovia to take in a Gazan teenager.
“If anybody should host this kid,” Pat thought, “it’s me.”
Medhat shared a room with a Bulgarian foreign exchange student, Andy Topchiev, in Pat’s quiet countryside home. The boys enjoyed the quintessential American high school experience: they competed on Cazenovia’s varsity sports teams, attended homecoming and prom, stayed up late playing video games and began many mornings with a last-minute blitz to catch the school bus before it departed.
“If I had known what was going to happen in Gaza,” Pat said, “I would have locked him up in the room upstairs.”
Pat and her daughter, Dana, have worked for nearly two years to find a home for Medhat.
They first created a petition calling on then-NY-22 Congressman Brandon Williams to call for a ceasefire in the initial weeks of the war. Then, when Medhat’s family made it to Cairo, Pat and Dana created a fundraiser to help provide for the family as they waited for then-president Joe Biden’s administration to consider their refugee status.
“In Gaza, he was a refugee with his own people,” Pat said. “Now he’s a refugee in Egypt.”
‘Before that…’
Like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, most of Medhat’s family fled the Israeli bombs that rendered their homes rubble. Along with his mother, Doaa, and younger sisters, Meera and Joudi, Medhat scrambled for safety.
They followed the Israeli Defense Forces’ instructions to relocate to so-called “safe zones.” They soon learned there are no safe zones in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Medhat’s home — his friends, neighborhood, and everything he has ever known — began to disappear, buried under rubble. The IDF bombed Medhat’s school, and killed some of his classmates, Dana said. In November 2023, an IDF sniper killed Medhat’s two young cousins, Nouran and Razan Allouh, as they tried to collect water — then killed Medhat’s uncle, Ahmad Allouh, as he tried to retrieve his children’s corpses, Medhat’s family told Dana.
By December 2023, most of Medhat’s family decided to head to the Rafah border crossing, escaping into Egypt through a gateway that was soon closed to other people just like them.
Medhat’s parents are separated, and before the war, his father lived with his new wife and their young child, Medhat’s half-brother Malek.
Medhat’s father is a doctor, and remained in Gaza City. Doctors, like journalists, are more vulnerable than other civilians in Gaza, according to data from Healthcare Workers Watch. The IDF has bombed hospitals and killed doctors who braved war to save innocent lives. Medical workers have been abducted and disappeared to detention facilities, where, without charge or trial, they endure torture and malnourishment, according to reporting from the Guardian.
Keren Carmeli, one of Pat’s daughters, raised funds to facilitate Medhat’s father, stepmom, and half-brother’s escape out of Gaza, and eventually raised enough money, but Israel closed the Rafah border crossing before they could cross.
For two years, Medhat did not know where his father was — or if he was even still alive.
In Cairo, Medhat’s family is safe from bombardment, but live as perpetual refugees. So, soon after crossing out of Rafah, Medhat and his family looked toward the country that had once embraced Medhat: America.
They filed applications for Humanitarian Parole through the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services. They endured questions from a U.S. immigration officer interrogating the family for potential connections to Hamas. They waited for months, then learned their initial Humanitarian Parole request was denied. They reapplied, and also applied to the U.S.’s refugee program, with Medhat’s American aunt in New Jersey as their sponsor.
In January, Medhat’s family got their breakthrough. Outgoing president Joe Biden’s administration granted them refugee status. Days later, incoming president Donald Trump stripped that status away, pausing the nation’s refugee program.
Medhat’s family is struggling. Egypt has not granted the family immigrant status, meaning Medhat’s mother, formerly a civil engineer, cannot earn an income, and his younger sisters cannot attend classes in Cairo’s schools. Medhat is trying to support the family with income from an office job — but each passing day, his own academic ambitions grow more distant.
Medhat had his life laid out ahead of him, but that alluring future now feels unattainable. Left to idle in Egypt, Medhat reminisces on a past life now out of reach.
“I’ve missed Gaza, because Gaza is a beautiful place. It got destroyed by the war, but before that,” Medhat said, “it was a beautiful place.”
‘What are they fighting?’
Pat Carmeli knows how to build a home.
Sitting in her idyllic yellow farmhouse, Pat shares a poem that her eldest daughter, Keren, sent her that morning. Keren wrote the poem to comfort her mother after Pat had become inconsolable on a recent phone call.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza hits close for both. Their family lived in Israel for over a decade, but reflections on their old home was not what broke Pat down.
Pat was crying for Gaza.
“When you look at what Gaza looks like, you can just picture, that’s a cemetery there, the amount of bodies that are in that rubble,” Pat said.
Israel and Palestine have had an outsized influence on Pat’s life. Born and raised a Catholic in Long Island, Pat married an Israeli student who was working as a security guard at the Israeli embassy in New York City, Pat said. She felt it was important to give him the Jewish children he wanted, and so she converted to Judaism.
In 1992, the pair moved to Israel with their two young children. There, Pat gave birth to her son, Benny, and daughter, Dana. Pat said her young family lived comfortably in a beautiful neighborhood.
“I was the ignorant American who just thought, ‘What are they fighting? What’s going on?’” Pat said.
Though she can’t remember an exact incident, Pat said her initial activism in Israel began in response to Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes. As documented by the United Nations, the IDF and Israeli settlers have for decades demolished Palestinian homes, water pipes, and other critical infrastructure to disposses Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Pat’s first demonstration was in Tel Aviv, outside of the Israel Defense Ministry. She came to protest Israel’s demolition of homes in Gaza.
“This is before Rachel Corrie ever got run over by a tractor,” Pat said.
When Pat encountered the Women in Black, an international network of female anti-war activists, protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians on the side of a road, she joined their demonstration. Soon, Pat was attending weekly protests — and beginning to question whether she wanted to raise her children in Israel.
Israel’s 2003 killing of American activist Rachel Corrie convinced Pat she needed to relocate her young children away from the influence of an Israeli culture that, in her view, celebrated their soldiers flattening a young woman with a bulldozer. While protesting Israel’s 2003 destruction of Palestinian homes in the Gazan city of Rafah, an Israeli army bulldozer crushed the young American in its tracks.
Corrie’s death shook Pat’s morality.
“My oldest daughter was going into 11th grade. They have compulsory military in Israel,” Pat said. “I was already an activist at this point. I did not want my kids serving in the IDF.”
Pat uprooted her young family from Israel in 2004.
As her relationship with her husband strained and eventually ended, Pat had to grapple with the prospect of transforming herself from a housewife and caretaker into a working mother capable of providing for her children on a single income, and without a house that felt like home.
In 2013, Pat opened the Pewter Spoon, a cafe in Cazenovia that soon became a fixture in town. Her daughters worked there along with Pat, and her daughter Ava now manages the cafe. Meanwhile, Pat settled down in a small cabin-like house while overseeing the construction of her real home, a yellow farmhouse furnished with quaint portraits and antiques.
Among the rustic decor and vintage furniture hangs a tribute: a cross-stitch that Pat knitted in Rachel Corrie’s honor.
She and her daughters returned to Palestine in 2013 to assist in the annual olive harvest. Dana and Pat are members of the Syracuse chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace, while Keren works with JVP in Albany.
Pat has helped bring internationally renowned advocates and activists, such as Dr. Norman Finkelstein and Miko Peled, to Central New York to raise awareness for Palestinian plight.
“It was just interesting that I end up with a kid from Gaza in my house,” Pat said. “But, you know, who better to understand his turmoil in person?”
Dana quickly pointed out that perhaps a Palestinian person might have been better.
“Yeah,” Pat agreed, “but there was none here.”
‘Bewildering, but beautiful moments’
Coming to Cazenovia was to be the first taste of that ideal life Medhat had dreamt for himself.
The green, open pastures surrounding Pat’s farmhouse, barn, and cabin were a sharp contrast to bustling Gaza City.
Along with Andy, the exchange student from Bulgaria, Medhat adjusted to Cazenovia. The community in turn embraced its new transplants.
Medhat’s friend, Avery Cashatt, credits Medhat for engaging the community with gusto.
Cazenovia brings in foreign exchange students every year, but Avery said she was immediately struck by Medhat’s friendliness. Even though he had traveled halfway around the world, Medhat wasn’t timid, and immediately endeared himself to the students at Cazenovia High School, Avery said.
Amid a school year of fun moments, one memory in particular still stands out to Avery. When prom season rolled around, Avery, a sophomore at the time, badly wanted to join her older sister and friends at the junior prom.
Medhat invited Avery to the dance, a deed that she said “really demonstrates his character.”
“It came so naturally to him to just really get to know everyone around him and include everyone around him and just embrace his situation, whatever it may be,” Avery said.
Medhat and Andy enjoyed other big thrills. The boys visited Washington, D.C. and New York City with Pat. Medhat worried that New York City might not have halal food options, but was quickly inspired to see how commonplace Muslim-friendly food was in the city.
Pat printed a photo album of pictures from the trip and gave Andy and Medhat a copy to commemorate the trip. She frequently flips through the album, reminiscing on a time when Medhat’s life was defined mostly by peace and possibility.
Pat was certain that Medhat left the photo album behind in Gaza City with most of his belongings — but when forced to evacuate with only the things he could carry, Medhat chose to bring his photo album.
Beyond the album of photos from the New York City trip, Pat has a trove of cherished pictures from Andy and Medhat’s time in her home.
Standing next to Pat’s donkey, Andy wears a keffiyeh, the traditional Arab headdress that became a symbol of the Palestinian struggle. In another, Pat and the boys play Scrabble. Here, Andy and Medhat eat chocolates from an Advent calendar. There, they proudly stand in their suits, ready for the junior prom.
Pat is especially glad to have a photograph of Medhat standing on a ladder, placing a star atop the Christmas tree that he and Andy helped Pat fell the day after Thanksgiving.
“It was one of those, just strange, bewildering, but beautiful moments,” Pat said.
During his time in the U.S., Medhat had the chance to meet his aunt, uncle, and six cousins in New Jersey. When the exchange student program tried to prevent Medhat from taking the trip to New Jersey because Medhat had missed the bus to school, Pat contacted the organization’s headquarters and lobbied them until they allowed the visit.
Medhat saw a real-world depiction of a Palestinian family making a happy life in America.
If his own relatives could do it, Medhat believed, so could he.
‘Nothing of that happened’
Cazenovia made Medhat feel at home, but by the end of the school year, he was ready to return to his true home in Gaza City. Medhat was proud of his home city and eager to exchange the countryside’s calm for the cityscape’s liveliness.
“Gaza City is a really interesting place,” Medhat told a reporter in early 2023. “You will find modern architecture, and you can find old places — really old, like the Great Mosque of Gaza, a place with a history of 2,000 years, and the Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, a 1,650-year-old beautiful church.”
That summer, Medhat prepared for what was to be his final year of high school, not knowing war would soon cut short his studies. Medhat envisioned the next chapters of his life, in which his academic rigor would earn him a prestigious education, a prosperous career, and the pursuit of happiness in the US.
“But, it’s funny,” Medhat said. “Nothing of that happened.”
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other armed groups from Gaza launched a now-infamous ambush on Israeli townships near the Gaza border. The attacks killed 815 Israeli civilians and another 280 military and security personnel, according to the Human Rights Watch. The militants also dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza.
Israel responded with an unprecedented full-scale invasion that ground on two years before halting. The IDF’s campaign laid waste to much of Gaza, and culminated in an offensive on Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were sheltering.
The IDF has damaged or destroyed 92% of the residential structures in Gaza, according to The Guardian. The Gaza Health Ministry has said that Israel has killed over 66,000 people. An independent study published in the Lancet journal in early 2025 found the death toll to be significantly higher than previously reported.
Medhat applied for refugee status rather than a spot on an American college campus.
In Cairo, Medhat is adjusting to his new reality defined by one setback after another.
Trump’s pause on the refugee program blocked Medhat’s family from finding refuge in America and had cascading impacts on Medhat’s academic prospects. When the U.S. became an unviable option, Medhat turned to the United Kingdom. He was accepted to three British universities, but because he had pivoted to apply to those schools at the last minute, he missed the window to apply for financial aid.
Medhat’s sisters don’t have the means to attend Egyptian schools. American universities won’t support Medhat, and the U.K. schools have a seemingly insurmountable financial barrier to entry.
Israel has long since destroyed every university and the majority of schools in Gaza, according to reporting by Al Jazeera. Even in a post-war world, higher education in Gaza is unrealistic. The University of Chicago compiled a thorough timeline of the IDF’s methodic assault on Gaza’s scholastic centers.
Along with educational facilities, the IDF has razed much of the historic architecture Medhat once spoke proudly of, including The Great Mosque of Gaza. The Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius — which the late Pope Francis telephoned every night to speak with Christian Gazans sheltering from Israel’s assaults — has withstood multiple bombings, but the 1,650-year-old structure has taken damage.
Medhat’s old roommate Andy has since gone on to college in Bulgaria. But as his own young ambitions flourish, Andy still considers the circumstances that have left his friend stuck in Cairo.
“Sometimes I thought about, what if Medhat wasn’t born in Gaza, but he was born in Cazenovia? He was born in Syracuse?” Andy said. “He was born somewhere where he won’t have to focus on surviving first, and then being able to follow his dreams, study and work like a normal person?”
Medhat said he knows about 15 students who were one year ahead of him in school in Gaza, who received full academic scholarships to prestigious American colleges. He watched friends a year older than himself graduate high school in Gaza and head across the world to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Dartmouth University, Vassar College, and more.
“Okay, I’m almost in the same boat as them. CV is good, good volunteer hours, my grades in the past years are good,” Medhat remembers thinking. “I might be able to get admitted in some schools and get good financial aid.”
But that didn’t happen.
Medhat was accepted into Pace University and Illinois State University, but wasn’t afforded enough financial aid to be able to attend either.
In place of the lofty dreams that once felt within his reach, Medhat, disillusioned, is trying to make the best out of what he feels is a hopeless situation.
“I went from applying to the U.S.,” Medhat said, “to applying to Iraq.”
‘I don’t know where these people go…’
A week after Trump announced Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire, Medhat made contact with his dad, Ayman.
Ayman, his wife Naema, and their baby son Malek remain in Gaza City, which the IDF besieged for a month in the lead up to the tenuous ceasefire agreement.
They are alive — but bear the scars of a man-made famine and what some experts have labeled a genocide. Medhat told Dana that his father looks ten years older, and Naema is visibly thinner. The family has enough flour, Dana said, but food and water remain scarce in Gaza as Israel has blocked humanitarian aid into the enclave.
Even if the Rafah border were to reopen, Medhat and his family members in Egypt don’t plan to return to Gaza in the near future.
Like returning to Gaza, moving to America seems unrealistic. Dana believes Doaa, Medhat’s mother, should consider relocating to Canada and France, rather than striving once again to be permitted into the U.S., which has targeted supporters of Palestine.
“Doaa is still hoping to resettle elsewhere if possible,” Dana wrote in a message to Central Current. “And Medhat says he thinks his dad will never leave Gaza.”
Medhat missed enrollment for the 2025-2026 academic year, but is applying to scholarships for the next academic year. Dana said he is also applying to colleges in Egypt that are more financially feasible than those in the U.S. or U.K. If accepted, he can enroll this winter, Dana said.
For Medhat, a welcome peace won’t change a world permanently altered. He compares what he sees as indifference and inaction by the U.S., a place he once wanted to call home, to an episode of the techno-dystopian TV show Black Mirror.
“I used to hear a lot of kids say, when they learn about the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, they would say, if they lived through that time, they would have done something,” Medhat said. “I don’t know where these people go that say they would react to these genocides.”
When Dana considers Medhat’s circumstances, she recalls her paternal grandfather, Jozef Inwentarz. Born in Poland, Jozef escaped the reach of Nazi Germany when a Polish family safeguarded him in their home for months. Jozef eventually made it onto a ship that took him and other orphans to Palestine.
“His own words,” Dana said. “To Palestine.”
Before his death, Jozef was able to share his story with the Shoah Foundation, an exhaustive project that documented the experiences of Holocaust survivors.
“Practicing the tradition of giving refuge to people who need it during a genocide is a tradition that I value so deeply,” Dana said. “I see what happened with Medhat as a beautiful and powerful mirror to that.”
Pat dreams of something more than peace for Palestinians like Medhat. She hopes, some day, the international fight that she joined decades ago won’t just end in legal justice, but in moral justice for the Palestinian people: a home to call their own.
That’s a distant dream. In the interim, Medhat continues looking for a university that will take him. Pat and Dana continue to look for a home for Medhat.
Wherever that is, they know it isn’t here.
Correction: An original version of this story stated that Medhat al-Rubei’s and his family’s humanitarian parole and refugee status were approved under President Joe Biden’s administration. Only Medhat’s and his family’s refugee case was approved. Central Current regrets this error.