Ahlam Firwana after her arrival in Jordan. Photo / Courtesy of Younis Firwana, The Washington Post
A Palestinian woman whose son serves in the United States Navy was secretly evacuated from Gaza in recent weeks after an intervention by the Trump Administration and the Israeli and Jordanian governments, according to people familiar with the matter and correspondence reviewed by the Washington Post.
The operation, entailing a co-ordinated pause in Israeli military strikes to safeguard the woman’s movements, illustrates the extreme difficulty of orchestrating a legal exit from Gaza without resources and influence.
The unusual operation occurred as the Trump Administration has, at turns, been accused of turning a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza – even, in some cases, when they are US citizens.
For Ahlam Firwana, 59, the escape to safety required US$10,000 ($17,240) in donated transportation costs, sophisticated software to monitor her movements amid the Israeli military’s ongoing assault, and the direct involvement of senior US officials who helped secure agreements from the governments of Jordan and Israel to facilitate the woman’s departure from Gaza.
Firwana’s son, Navy Petty Officer Younis Firwana, 32, joined the military in 2023 seeking a path to US citizenship.
After the Gaza war began that October, his mother and six siblings faced ever-increasing danger and privation, he recalled in an interview.
In 2024, the family’s seven-storey home was levelled in the bombardment. Food and medicine grew scarce.
“They had a point where they were eating birdseed,” he said.
The evacuation of US citizens from Gaza has been a contentious issue since the war began after Hamas militants staged a deadly, co-ordinated attack in Israel on October 7, 2023.
Palestinian Americans and their families have complained since then that the US was not doing enough to ensure the safe exit of US citizens from Gaza, with some suing the Biden Administration in December.
Maria Kari, a lawyer representing some of those families, said the situation has become more dire under President Donald Trump.
In August, the State Department announced that it would halt visitor visas for people from Gaza.
The decision was made days after far-right activist Laura Loomer reacted to video of Palestinian children and their caregivers arriving at an airport in San Francisco by labelling the programme a “national security threat”. Loomer holds outsize influence with the President, though she has no official role in the Administration.
The children and spouses of US citizens have seen their requests for evacuations denied based on national security grounds, according to accounts from lawyers and human rights groups.
Younis Firwana became a naturalised US citizen in February 2024 on the day he graduated from Navy boot camp.
He was told, he said, to stand beneath a Jordanian flag during the ceremony as the US did not recognise the flag of Palestine.
From California, where he is stationed as a Navy medic, Younis Firwana had been working since early 2024 to co-ordinate his mother’s departure through Jordan.
He’d applied for expedited processing for his siblings’ cases, too, but received denials in every case but his mother’s, he said.
He secured approval from US immigration officials for her to enter the US, but couldn’t find anyone who could escort her out of Gaza or help her renew her expired passport. US officials, he said, told him their hands were tied.
In early September, Younis Firwana was connected with Special Operations Association of America, a veterans organisation that has supported the legal evacuation of roughly 1100 people from Gaza since the war began, including the mother of a US soldier.
Alex Plitsas, a member of the veterans group and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, assembled a team to help the Firwana family.
Among them was Steve Gabavics, a retired Army colonel who served in Jerusalem from 2001 to 2004 as chief of staff for the US Security Co-ordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Plitsas also enlisted the help of Morgan Ortagus, Trump’s deputy special envoy to the Middle East and herself a Navy reservist, who connected the team with top officials at the US Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Another member of the group notified the National Security Council of planning, according to messages reviewed by the Post.
Spokespeople for the White House and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
A US official, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the evacuation of Ahlam Firwana, attributed this successful evacuation to US diplomats in Amman.
“The team at Embassy Jordan went above and beyond to help the mother of an American service member to get safely out of Gaza,” this person said. “This is an example of the heroic work our Foreign Service officers perform around the world every day.”
Gabavics said he leveraged connections from his past work, including contacts within the Israeli military and the Israeli security and intelligence organisations Shin Bet and Mossad, to secure approval for Ahlam Firwana’s exit from Gaza.
A representative for the Co-ordinator of Government Activities in the Territories acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide one. A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gabavics told the Post that conversations with the Israelis centred in part on ensuring “they didn’t target her location”, and they sought “a security buffer around her” so that the extraction team would not unintentionally be hit by a military strike.
At the Jordanian Embassy in DC, officials expedited approval for Ahlam Firwana to enter Jordan. The ambassador, Dina Kawar, said in a statement that her Government was “glad to help facilitate” Firwana’s exit from Gaza and that the gesture should be viewed as part of Jordan’s “continuous and broader humanitarian effort – not an exception”.
“Every day,” Kawar added, “Jordan is working quietly and tirelessly to support those in need.”
Ben Clay, an Army Special Operations veteran who led the extraction operation, said he used an application he’d developed to determine the safest transport routes.
When the original plan for an Israeli escort was abandoned because of paperwork delays, the veterans’ group donated US$10,000 to hire ground transportation to securely move Firwana from her building in Gaza City to the Kerem Shalom border crossing in the enclave’s southeast corner, according to messages reviewed by the Post.
In mid-September, Israel ordered the entire population of Gaza City to evacuate after an intensifying offensive. As conditions grew desperate, the hired transport plan had to be scrapped. Instead, one of Firwana’s sons located a vehicle and started driving his mother towards the gate.
They didn’t get very far, as the roadways were clogged with people trying to flee. With the help of her daughter, Firwana completed the last 14.4km on foot – protected from above by surveillance assets and the airstrike stoppage.
The journey took 19 hours in all. On September 17, Plitsas sent a small group of collaborators a celebratory two-word message: “SHE’S OUT!”
Kari, the lawyer representing Palestinian American families, welcomed the news of Firwana’s release but said the case raised questions about others who remain stranded, including her client Salsabeel Elhelou, a US citizen who is seeking the evacuation of her three non-citizen children.
Emails shared with the Post show the US Embassy in Jerusalem has cited “US national security” and concerns about visas as reasons for not helping to evacuate Elhelou’s children.
The US Government had shown deference to military families while making it “very clear that on a wholesale level, they don’t care about Palestinian lives, even when they are American Palestinian lives”, said Kari.
For now, Ahlam Firwana remains in Jordan, awaiting visa approval. Her son said he is eager to help the rest of his family leave Gaza, but must await a slow-moving and opaque visa application process.
Learning that his mother’s case had attracted the attention of top US Government officials has had a profound effect on the Firwanas, her son said. “That means a lot, that these guys care about my family,” he said. “I’m not alone.”
He wonders, though, why his mother’s departure required such extraordinary intervention, when the US had, in previous years, established policy to support humanitarian resettlements from war zones, including Ukraine and Afghanistan.
“The US should be doing more than this,” he said.
- John Hudson contributed to this report.
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