I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (21 page)

As the end of Eid and the Feast of Sacrifice approached, the Egyptians finally allowed me and the others who were stuck at the border to pass. I returned to my children carrying candles, clothes, blankets, food and kerosene for the stove: all things so hard to obtain inside the Gaza Strip.

My absence made me all the more determined to take my family to the olive grove and the beach on December 12, to give us all a break from the endless struggle and our sadness.

That fall, I thought a lot about our future in Gaza and the circumstances surrounding us. Our challenges were personal, yes,
but also the sabre-rattling between the Israelis and the Palestinians was intense; the tension in the air was so palpable that no one could ignore it, not even Gazans inured to tension.

The seeds of this particular impasse were planted after Hamas’s election victory, when both Egypt and Israel closed access to Gaza in July 2007. Everything that we needed for survival was controlled by Israel: gas, water, electricity. In retaliation, the United Nations reports, in the seventeen months following the blockade, 2,700 Qassam rockets made in underground labs in Gaza were fired into Israel, killing 4 Israeli civilians and injuring 75 others. During those same months the IDF hit the Gaza Strip with more than 14,600 artillery shells, which killed 59 Palestinians and wounded 270.

Tension had eased a little in June 2008 after an Egyptian-brokered truce and ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, but then escalated madly again in November. Accusation and counter-accusation seemed the only forms of speech to survive between the Palestinians and Israelis. The blockade had not been lifted during the supposed truce: the borders were never opened. Israeli attacks continued and Qassam rockets flew into Israel, and the Israel Defense Forces killed ever more of the so-called militants it found lurking at the border.

The Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem continued to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Palestinian houses in Gaza continued to be demolished, land continued to be confiscated, political assassinations escalated. On both sides, the habit was to accuse the other side, never examining your own. Where was the international community? Who was looking at what was happening to Palestinians? I am against rocket attacks and suicide bombings, but I’m also against shutting the door on people who are suffering, who don’t have a chance at a life an ordinary Israeli takes for granted. I ask for a decent life for Palestinians. Instead of building a wall, we need to build a bridge.

On Thursday, December 25, I left the Sheba hospital in Tel Aviv after work and returned as usual to Gaza. The early darkness of a winter evening had settled in and by the time I got home, the cold damp of the season had seeped into my bones. As I had been winding my way through the checkpoints at the Erez Crossing, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert had been issuing what now looks like his final warning, on Al Arabiya television, saying: “I’m telling them now, it may be the last minute; I’m telling them to stop it. We are stronger.” Tzipi Livni, the minister of foreign affairs, had also paid a visit to Egypt, which had to be some sort of a sign.

That evening, the children and I discussed the upcoming week and made a grocery list, and on Friday I went to the market to do the weekly shopping. Most people were steeling themselves for the worst, but that day the Israelis suddenly opened two border crossings and allowed more than one hundred truckloads of humanitarian aid to flow into the beleaguered territory, as well as fuel for the power plant. Was it a trick? Did the Israeli government do this so people would let down their guard?

We tried to just take things as they came and get on with life. Our washing machine was broken, so on Saturday morning, after the younger children had gone off to class on the school buses that came for them at six-thirty, I drove to Jabalia Camp to fetch a technician to repair our washer. That’s how I came to be away from the house and separated from my children when all hell broke loose in Gaza.

I had just parked and got out of my car when I saw, heard and felt the attacks begin. It was as if the earth was lifting, shifting and smashing itself into a different configuration. Israeli rockets, bombs and shells came from every direction. Bombs (I learned later they used 2,000-pound Mark 84 bombs as well as laser-guided penetration bombs) fell from the sky, F-16s and Apache attack
helicopters roared overhead, rockets ricocheted in from gunships off the coast, and tanks on the border let loose with an astonishing barrage of explosives. The air was full of fire, smoke and debris. Huge hunks of metal and the remnants of houses mixed with crashing street lamps and shards of glass.

This first barrage went on for about five minutes. Suddenly it was quiet, the streets dark with destruction. I ran back to my car, which thankfully was still in one piece, and with people screaming in panic all over the roads, I inched my vehicle out of there and found my way home. Bessan was there, but none of the other children. Fear tightened around my chest like a vise. Had they made it to school? Where were they? How would I find them? I no sooner formulated a plan to go and search for them than they came through the door, in twos and threes—the younger ones first, then Aya and Mayar from the junior school and Shatha from the high school. Dalal had gone to visit her cousin, who was in the same architectural engineering class and lived in another part of the Gaza Strip. I called her on my cellphone. She was there when the shelling began and was safe for the moment, but couldn’t get home because the roads were closed.

The children told me that the school buses stopped when the bombing began and they had decided to try to get home on their own. They’d hide during the explosions and run again after they stopped, until they got back to our building. Imagine—school-children having to run for their lives, having to figure out how to get out of harm’s way.

This was the beginning of what would become a twenty-three-day assault on the Gaza Strip. We decided to stay in the apartment because it was the safest place for us; the Israelis knew this was my house and to me that meant we would never be wrongly targeted in their search for the militants they said they were after. My brother Rezek was in Egypt, so his family left their
apartment in our building and went to stay with his wife’s parents in Jabalia Camp. My brother Shehab, who lived down the street, decided to send his wife and family to the community centre in Jabalia Camp, as they thought it would be safer. Shehab moved in with us so he could keep an eye on his place and also because we’d heard that people living alone were being killed. So, in our building, we had my brother Atta and his family, Nasser and his family and, in my apartment, the kids and Shehab and me.

By all accounts, this insane attack on the men, women and children of the Gaza Strip—along with every other living being and anything that humans had built to shelter in—was designed to bring Hamas to its knees, although the official excuse used by the Israelis was that they needed to stop the homemade rocket attacks on Sderot, the Israeli town closest to the Strip, and to end the smuggling of arms into Gaza through the tunnels from Egypt.

I’d predicted that this was going to happen sometime, and had even stockpiled a few items, such as candles, against the day. But no one, not even the worst pessimist, had imagined that the Israeli attack would go on for twenty-three relentless days. There was no electricity, no phone service, no gas (actually, the gas lines had been cut before the attacks began) and no television. We couldn’t sleep for the noise and terror. I went out during daylight hours to scavenge for what we needed to survive, but everything was in short supply. After only a few days there was no flour to buy and no pita bread, a staple for us, in the stores. Some shopkeepers divided their stock up and prepared baskets, one for each family, but soon enough that was gone as well. Nadia’s sister Sobhia heard of a place that had pita. I went with her and my son Mohammed, and between us we managed to purchase three hundred small pitas. With a large extended family, I knew they wouldn’t last long.

The ground operation began on January 3. Before that, even though we were under attack, we had been able to move cautiously
to the market to get food, but now we became prisoners in our own home. Hundreds of tanks rolled across the border, firing at everything that moved and sending merciless volleys into one building after another. At that point we’d already been under siege for two weeks. A transistor radio was our only connection to the outside apart from our cellphones, which were now almost out of power although we’d been using them sparingly.

My daughter Shatha and her cousin Ghaida—Atta’s daughter, who lives in the same building as us, just one floor away—said they knew how to rig up a homemade charger. To my astonishment these teenage girls connected four radio batteries and turned them into a charger. They cut the cable on the cellphone charger, took the two wires inside the cable and attached one to each end of the batteries, which they had taped together with adhesive, and put the other end of the cable into the phone. It took ten hours to charge one cellphone, but that charger became our lifeline.

The shelling seemed to be coming from every direction. We couldn’t figure out who or what the target was. All I ever heard on the radio was the body count, as though we Palestinians had been reduced to numbers rather than mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers.

The dining room, in the centre of our apartment, became the sanctuary for the family since we needed to avoid the outside rooms—the kitchen, the bedrooms and a living room that had wall-to-wall windows and a dangerous exposure to the explosions. I told my children to drag their mattresses into the dining room as we would be safer there and we could all be together. And that’s where we stayed, day after day, night after night. We told each other stories. Shatha studied by candlelight because she hoped to be one of the top ten graduates from her high school when the June exams were written. My brother’s wife, Aida, kept saying how proud we would all be of Shatha when her studies
were completed. I was proud of my family and the way we worked together to survive the horror outside our windows, both physically and psychologically. We offered encouragement and passionate support to each other.

Soon after the assault on the Gaza Strip started, I found myself playing the role of a journalist. Hundreds of correspondents from the international community—BBC, CNN, CBC, Fox News, Sky News—were stuck on a muddy hill outside Ashqelon, the town closest to the Erez Crossing, because the Israeli military refused to allow them access to Gaza. Israeli reporters were refused entry to Gaza as well. Their cameras could capture the plumes of smoke from the exploding bombs, but there were no eyewitnesses from the media to report the facts on the ground. So the Israeli media started calling me on my cellphone since I speak Hebrew fluently and was living in the middle of the catastrophe that their soldiers had created in Gaza.

Shlomi Eldar, my friend from Israeli TV’s Channel 10, regularly called me in the late afternoon to ask what had happened that day. From the vantage point of my living room window I could see entire neighbourhoods being obliterated with bombs and rockets. And not just one sortie or two; the raids came so often and so powerfully that they reduced the place to rubble, as though to erase the evidence that people had ever lived here—that old people and small children, teenagers and parents walked on these streets, slept in these houses, ate together, bowed to the east and kneeled to pray on their mats.

Though I was uneasy at first—worried about reprisals against me and my family—I was finally willing to give these interviews because someone needed to get the story to the outside world. Shlomi later explained why he was calling me: “When the incursion into Gaza started and the media were denied access, I thought he could give us a glimpse into life in Gaza … Starting
on the first day of the war, we talked by telephone for four or five minutes during the news portion of the show. He gave us details about how he and his family were coping during the ongoing attack. It was a very unique look at the lives of Palestinians. The audience was not particularly sympathetic as the view of most Israelis was that the Qassam rocket attacks from Hamas into the town of Sderot had to be stopped by any action necessary.” Sympathetic or not, with my voice in their ears, Israelis couldn’t entirely ignore the costs to Palestinians of their military action.

Living in these surreal circumstances gave me time to think, to project into the future and to reflect on the past. I knew that eventually the incursion would end, but what then? I’d seen destruction before, as a child when Sharon bulldozed our house, as an adult when the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority was blasted into smithereens by a barrage of shells. But how would we ever come back from this lethal attack on the men, women and children of Palestine? How could psychologists, sociologists, medical doctors, economists rehabilitate the people who had come through the craziness of this annihilation?

As we waited and prayed for deliverance, my thoughts also went to the couples in my fertility clinic who waited every month, praying for good news. Maybe thinking about the anxieties others suffer was a way to keep myself sane, to let my thoughts focus on something other than the present danger to the people I loved. A couple going through fertility treatment also have to wait and hope. It takes a long time. There are the injections given early every morning for a month, the ultrasounds and blood tests, the questions about in vitro fertilization that most couples don’t want to discuss when the process begins. There are the unanswered questions, the not knowing.

I remember sitting in the dining room under the barrage thinking about how much these infertile women suffer. I recalled
the times I’d had to say, “I’m sorry, the result is negative, you’ll have to try again.” The words are easy to say but so hard for the woman to bear. Then there are the successful treatments, the joy, the worry, the follow-up, the delivery. And at last there is a baby to love, to raise, to teach. And after all that, would this child be huddled on a floor in the middle of the family home trying to avoid a rocket attack? Would all that effort to reproduce lead to fulfilling the dreams of this newborn, or would it lead to a scenario like the one I was sitting in the middle of?