I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey

by Izzeldin Abuelaish

  Eventually, we drifted out of the dining room. I needed to prepare for an interview with Oshrat Kutler from Channel 10 about the effect this incursion would have on women’s health. Shatha, Mayar, Aya and Noor went into the bedroom to read, to do homework, to pass the time until we would huddle together again on mattresses spread out on the dining room floor. My older girls’ bedroom was big—about five metres by four; it had an enclosed balcony and an entire wall of windows. Most of the decor in the room had come from trips I’ve made to other countries—such as bright blue, red and beige sheets from Egypt and Pakistan—and the ceiling was covered with stars that caught the light all day and shone in the dark at night. There were mirrors on the walls, and jewellery cluttered their dressing tables, along with Mayar’s lip gloss—her latest favourite possession. Dalal’s drafting desk sat in one corner. There was a computer on another desk, and a red Persian carpet from Afghanistan covered the floor. It occurred to me as I watched them from the dining room that despite the shelling and the loss of their mother, there was a level of happiness in this house, a sense of togetherness that stirred my soul.

  Raffah was in the kitchen rummaging around for a piece of bread to make a sandwich and Bessan was helping her. Mohammed was at the door that leads to the staircase of the apartment building, stirring the charcoal to keep the embers going and trying to direct a bit of heat into our cold, damp house. I had finished my preparation for the interview and was playing with Abdullah, carrying him on my shoulders, touring the house, stopping to talk first to Raffah and Bessan in the kitchen, then to Mohammed at the door, and finally entering the girls’ bedroom. I was trying to distract him; at the age of six, the situation was almost incomprehensible to him.

  We’d left the girls’ room and were in the middle of the dining room when it happened. There was a monstrous explosion that seemed to be all around us, and a thundering, fulminating sound that penetrated my body as though it were coming from within me. I remember the sound. I remember the blinding flash. Suddenly it was pitch-dark, there was dust everywhere, something was sucking the air out of me, I was suffocating. Abdullah was still on my shoulders, Raffah came running screaming from the kitchen, Mohammed stood frozen at the front door. As the dust began to settle, I realized the explosion had come from my daughters’ bedroom. I put Abdullah down, and Bessan ran ahead of me from the kitchen—we wound up at the bedroom door at the same time. The sight in front of me was something I hope no other person ever has to witness.

  Bedroom furniture, school books, dolls, running shoes and pieces of wood were splintered in a heap, along with the body parts of my daughters and my niece. Shatha was the only one standing. Her eye was on her cheek, her body covered in bloody puncture wounds, her finger hanging by a thread of skin. I found Mayar’s body on the ground; she’d been decapitated. There was brain material on the ceiling, little girls’ hands and feet on the floor as if dropped there by someone who left too quickly. Blood spattered the entire room, and arms in familiar sweaters and legs in pants that belonged to my children leaned at crazed angles where they had blown off the torsos of my beloved daughters and niece. I ran to the front door for help but realized I couldn’t go outside because there were soldiers on the street. A second rocket smashed into the room while I was at the door.

  To this day I’m not absolutely certain about who was killed when. My brother Nasser had raced down the stairs after the shell hit, and he got to the door at the same time as my brother Atta and his daughter Ghaida. They were caught by the second explosion. I couldn’t find Bessan and kept calling her name, “Bessan, Bessan, where are you, tell me where you are so I can help you.” But she was now dead, along with Mayar. So was Aya and so was Noor.

  The apartment was full of the dead and wounded. Shatha was standing in front of me, bleeding profusely. I was sure that Ghaida had also been killed as there were wounds on every single part of her body and she lay still on the floor. Nasser had been struck by shrapnel in the back, and was also on the floor. I wondered who could help us, who could get us out of this catastrophe. Then I realized I still had a connection to the outside world. I called Shlomi Eldar, but the call went to his voice mail. I left a message; “YaRabbi, YaRabbi—my God, my God—they shelled my house. They killed my daughters. What have we done?” All I could think was, This is the end. This is the end.

  In the meantime, my brother Atta’s wife, Sanaa, had fixed a white flag to a pole and had left the house to find help. Nasser’s wife, Akaaber, went into the street with her. They walked to the refugee camp two kilometres away and told the people there what had happened. Despite the colossal danger in the street, the people from Jabalia all came: our friends and old neighbours, the Palestinians we had grown up with and struggled for survival with. They came with stretchers and blankets, pushing boldly past the soldiers and tanks, to help my family. It took them about fifteen minutes to get to the house.

  Meanwhile, I was trying to sort out who else was injured. Shehab had shrapnel in his head and back. I was trying to check his wounds as I held Shatha in my arms, when I looked up to see Mohammed, and was stricken by the thought that he’d just lost his mother and now his sisters were gone. I did not realize that tears were streaming down my face, all I know is that my thirteen-year-old son saw the state I was in and made me a precious gift. He told me not to be sad, that his sisters were happy and with their mother. He meant this; it came from the depths of his faith.

  And then Mohammed said, “Ghaida took a breath.” Before that I thought she was also dead, but he was right. My old neighbours lifted Shatha, Ghaida, Nasser and Shehab onto stretchers and wrapped the bodies of Bessan, Mayar, Aya and Noor in blankets and we set out to carry them to the hospital.

  We kept walking. My mind was racing. I knew that if Ghaida had any hope of surviving her wounds and if Shatha’s eyesight could be saved, we needed to get to an Israeli hospital, but we were walking to the Kamal Edwan hospital in northern Gaza, which with thousands of casualties to treat had long ago run out of the equipment they would need to help my daughter, my niece and my brother. When we arrived there, I called Shlomi again.

  Shlomi picks up the story from here. “It was five on Friday afternoon, and I was doing the news when I saw Izzeldin’s name come up on the screen of my mobile phone. I was live on air so didn’t answer the call. But I wondered what was going on. We were about to do an interview with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and the introduction had already begun when I saw his name come up on my mobile again and I made the decision to take the call live on air. I told the viewing audience that we had something very important coming in and pushed the telephone speaker button and held the mobile phone up so the viewer could see it. I think my director wondered what on earth I was doing taking a phone call in the middle of a live news broadcast.

  “Izzeldin was incredibly distraught and repeated what I heard later on my voice mail: “They shelled my house. They killed my daughters. What have we done?” I can’t tell you how extraordinary this was—it’s not something a news anchor ever does—to take a call in the middle of the show. I was all the time wondering if this was the wrong thing to do at the same time as I was listening in abject horror to what he was saying. Then I heard my editor’s voice in my earpiece saying, ‘Move the telephone closer to the microphone.’

  “The conversation that followed was heartbreaking. He kept crying, ‘Oh God, they killed my daughters. Shlomi, I wanted to save them, but they are dead. They were hit in the head. They died on the spot. Allah, what have we done to them. Oh God.’ His surviving children were screaming in the background when I asked Izzeldin where he lived. He was sobbing. ‘No one can get to us. Oh Shlomi, oh God, oh Allah, my daughters are dead.’ He told me the roads were closed and that they couldn’t move toward the border. I asked him which junction his house was near. He told me and I said on air, ‘If anyone hears us in the IDF, call the Zimmo junction. Maybe some of the wounded can still be saved.’ I wondered if we could ask for a ceasefire and get an ambulance to come
. All this was live on air.

  “Frankly, I don’t know what made me decide to push that telephone button. Was it instinct for news? Was it my heart speaking louder than my head?

  “Once I’d heard Izzeldin begging for help, pleading that we get ambulances to the border, I knew I couldn’t leave the story. I said to the viewing audience, ‘I don’t know how I can hang up this phone, so I will excuse myself from the studio, because I cannot hang up on him.’ I took off my microphone, got up from the anchor desk and walked to my office to make a phone call to the administrator of the Erez checkpoint. I shouted at him to please open the border and get them out of Gaza to the hospital and let the ambulances we’d called through. My producer sent a cameraman to follow my movement to the office. In the meantime a military correspondent from our channel was calling every soldier he knew and asking them to help.

  “The live part—that’s the clip that shot around the world on YouTube—went on for between five and seven minutes. But I didn’t want to cut my telephone connection with Izzeldin, so I stayed on the line with him until the ambulances arrived at the border. My producer had sent my cameraman to the border and he picked up the footage of the story there.”

  When I got Shlomi on the phone. He said, “Ambulances are coming from this side and we are working to make sure there’s permission for the Palestinian ambulances to move to the Erez Crossing and make the transfer.”

  I’d hung up and was moving toward the border with the ambulances from Kamal Edwan hospital when Dr. Zeev Rotstein, the director general of the Sheba Medical Center, phoned to say he had heard the terrible news. He told me to come immediately with the two wounded children and my brother Nasser (Shehab stayed behind for treatment at Kamal Edwan) to the Sheba hospital, that he would arrange everything. He was the voice of reason in the midst of madness, chaos and indescribable grief.

  As the ambulances headed toward the Erez Crossing, bombs were still dropping, rockets whizzing through the streets, people screaming. But it was surreal—I had no fear at all. It was as though I had moved emotionally into an untouchable zone: the worst had already happened and nothing could frighten me now. Mohammed had taken Raffah and Abdullah to his aunt’s house, where Dalal was staying, and that’s how she found out that Bessan, Mayar, Aya and Noor had been killed and that Shatha and her cousin Ghaida were gravely wounded. My brother Atta stayed with them while we inched our way across the border into Israel.

  Just as Shlomi had promised, there were ambulances waiting on the other side. But Ghaida was dying, and I didn’t think she would survive the trip in the ambulance all the way to Sheba hospital. She needed a helicopter, but the crossing was a military zone and no helicopter was allowed to land there. So I sent her to Barzilai hospital in nearby Ashquelon, which wasn’t equipped to treat her severe head wound but could give her blood and stabilize her, and most importantly was a place that a medical helicopter could land. I went with my daughter and brother in the ambulances to Sheba while Ghaida was taken by ambulance to the Barzilai hospital. Soon enough, all of us arrived at Sheba—Ghaida airlifted from Ashquelon—to an enormous show of support from the staff I’d worked with, as well as passionate blessings from Israeli, Arab and Bedouin friends in Israel who had been watching the drama unfold on television and had gathered in the hospital foyer to wait for us.

  It was after midnight when Shlomi came from the studio to talk to me. He was shocked to see me still covered with blood and wanted to know what more he could do for my family. He’d already done more than anyone could possibly ask. He’d masterminded the rescue that probably saved the life of my niece Ghaida and the eyesight of my daughter Shatha.

  Back in Gaza, Dalal was having to cope with the terrible news and take care of the younger children. She said later that she was so grateful for the telephone call just before the shells hit: “It was like a conference call—we were all talking at once. I remember I said to Bessan and Aya, ‘This is the first time I had a chance to talk to everyone together.’ They were so important to me. Bessan, Shatha and I were best friends. Bessan and I were always together at the university. That’s why I was crying when I asked her, ‘Are you safe?’ She told me she was safe, but she wasn’t. Not at all. My pain in this loss is too great. I can’t stay in Gaza. I can’t stay in our house anymore. I can’t go back to the university.”

  In the meantime, Dr. Rotstein was on the phone in Tel Aviv. He remembers the details of that day and the ones that followed much better than I do, so I’ll let him describe what happened:

  “I wanted to bring the rest of his family here to Israel. It was the humanitarian thing to do regardless of what was going on. I hoped to create a small haven in this global hell for them. I couldn’t bear the idea that after the horrible disaster, part of the family was there and part here, that there was a split amongst the surviving children. They needed to be united.

  “When I met with Izzeldin the next morning at the hospital, I was totally lost for words; I hadn’t any idea what to say to him. But instead of me finding the words to encourage him, I found myself being encouraged by him. His message was that his own personal disaster should serve as a kind of milestone, and from here we should do more for peace in order to prevent such a horrible thing from happening again.

  “At the same time he was trying to establish that the Israeli army had made a mistake, and I agreed with him. If the rockets had been fired accidentally, the army should admit that. I told him, ‘I can assure you, there won’t be a cover-up.’ He kept saying over and over again, ‘I want the truth. Nothing can bring my daughters back, but I have to know the truth.’ I vowed I wasn’t going to let this go. I spoke to a senior army chief of staff and said that Izzeldin Abuelaish was one of my team members, part of my staff. I was promised that the army would get to the bottom of it. And eventually they did admit that the shelling of the doctor’s house had been a terrible mistake.

  “That same morning I held an improvised press conference and asked Izzeldin to speak. To be honest, my attempt was not well received. Some felt that as a government employee I had no right to invite him to the podium. We try to avoid politics. We do humanitarian work. But that shouldn’t stop us from facilitating the conversation where what needs to be said is said. I was attacked afterwards, mostly by the families of Israeli soldiers, because every single thing here that relates to Israel or Palestine is terribly sensitive. However, my feeling is that I’m not just a manager or an administrator, I’m a leader, and I’m obliged to contribute vision and beliefs rather than simply execute instructions. Even without declaring what I felt, I should lead rather than be led.”

  During the press conference, an Israeli woman interrupted the proceedings to claim that my house was targeted because I was harbouring militants. Levana Stern, the Israeli mother of three sons, one of whom was with the IDF in Gaza, tried to blame me for the tragedy, screaming at me, saying I must have been hiding weapons in my home or that Hamas must have found safe haven in my house so they could fire at the Israeli soldiers. When I stood up to refute these accusations, Ghaida was upstairs in the intensive care unit in critical condition with shrapnel wounds all over her body and Shatha had come out of the surgery to restore her eyesight and reattach her middle finger and was resting in a room upstairs.

  I felt as though my family had been re-attacked, as though my daughters had been killed all over again by this dishonest version of the murderous event. It was so painful to hear the truth falsified. One person in the lobby who was watching the press conference even dared to suggest my girls were killed by Qassam rockets fired at them by Hamas.

  From the moment we arrived in the hospital, I was thoroughly committed to finding out how this had happened, and I now realized a cover-up was a real possibility. I wanted the Israeli army to tell me why my home, which had harboured no militants, which was filled with children whose only weapons were love, hopes and dreams, was fired upon. I expected an apology from the IDF. I felt certain they would say that an errant tank shell had hit my h
ome. But in the days after the attack, that’s not what I heard. First, the excuse was that there were snipers on the roof, but if there were snipers on the roof why had they fired twice at the second floor of a five-storey building? Then, that shrapnel taken from Ghaida’s wounds were actually fragments of Qassam rocket—which was not true. Then came variations on Levana Stern’s charges: they were firing at militants in my house, but the only militants I harboured were my children, who were militant about love, hope and dreams. An army spokesperson said a preliminary investigation showed that soldiers were returning fire in the direction of a building from which they’d been fired upon. One army officer said, “The Israeli Defence Forces does not target innocents or civilians, and during the operation into Gaza the army has been fighting an enemy that does not hesitate to fire from within civilian targets.”

  I was outraged by the remark. These are very sophisticated weapons and they know precisely what they have targeted. In this case, they’d set their sites on a girls’ bedroom. All that was ever fired out of our house was love, hugs and acts of peace—nothing else, ever. It was unethical and immoral to, in effect, stab my children with lies after they were already dead.

  When I was interviewed on TV about what happened, I was also asked what I thought about Levana Stern. I said that I would like to meet her one on one and that I would listen to her if she would listen to me. The media arranged the meeting, but she arrived with a cold and distant attitude, and although she told others in the room that she was sorry for my loss—and did apologize to me later—she insisted that she still believed Israel had fought this war to defend itself. A Tel Aviv weekly newspaper put it another way when it wrote: “Levana Stern didn’t attack Abuelaish. She was protecting herself from him because he threatened her view of Palestinians as terrorists.”