I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (20 page)

At six—ten and a half hours after I arrived at this desk—he handed me my passport and told me I could go. The Arab-Israeli taxi driver had waited for me all that time and I asked him to take
me as fast as possible to the Sheba Medical Center. He chose the route with the fewest checkpoints. At the first checkpoint we reached, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the guard said, “What are you doing here? This is only for Israelis.” I explained that I had a permit, that I was a doctor who worked at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, that my wife was a patient there and gravely ill, that I was rushing to her side. He behaved as though I were a suicide bomber trying to sneak into the city. He demanded that I turn off my cellphone, then he called the police and told them he’d caught a Palestinian from Gaza trying to cross and that they should arrest me. He insisted I sign a form that said I understood why I was being arrested. Finally a call from Israeli security instructed him to let me go and suggested he should have examined my permit more carefully before sounding the alarm.

You’d think the reprimand would have meant something to this man. But all it meant was another delay for me, as he tore up the arrest form he’d filled out and demanded that I sign another paper saying that no one at his checkpoint had harmed me physically. And to prove that he held the trump card, he announced that I had to go to Jericho—fifty kilometres back from the checkpoint we were at—and start my return journey all over again. What’s more, he instructed me to check in with the Director of Coordination for Israel in Jericho to get a new permit: mine had now expired.

And so we drove with haste to Jericho. Once there, I got the new permit and was instructed to go to the checkpoint in Bethlehem, another detour in my voyage through hell. I was incredulous—but what choice did I have? When we got to Bethlehem, the female soldier in charge entered my name into her computer—and guess what came up on the screen? The same message that had appeared at the Erez Crossing when I’d left Gaza on August 16, the same message that had almost cancelled
my departure, banning me from travelling for security reasons. Since the information had found its way onto my file in error, I had presumed it had been removed. Presumption is a wild card where I live.

I was sent to a room one metre by one and a half metres, only enough room to stand up or sit down in, and told to wait. When I heard the key turn in the lock, I could barely contain my rage. It was now seven-thirty in the evening. They had taken away my cellphone; I could not check on my wife. I sat there powerless while precious minutes of her life ticked by. Each hour felt like a day. The humiliation of being treated as a nobody, a dispensable person, someone who didn’t deserve common decency or even the respect of the law, read like a palimpsest of my entire life, the barely erased past being rewritten yet again here in an airless cubicle on the West Bank.

Then one of the officers beckoned to me through the glass wall that separated his desk from where I was being held. Someone unlocked the door and I proceeded toward this man, who was leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, finger crooked toward me as if he were calling a dog to sit. He didn’t even make eye contact when he thrust the permit toward me and said, “Take it and go.”

I was exhausted, hungry, thirsty and frantic. It took an hour to get to the hospital, and when I finally arrived I went straight to the ICU. Nadia was unconscious. I called her name, telling her, “I am here with you.” I have no idea whether she heard me. Exhausted, I slept on a desk in the hall that night so I wouldn’t have to leave her.

The hospital gave me an office space with a bed so I could work and rest. Over the next few days she seemed to improve. Nadia said all along that she would walk on her own feet back to the family. She was absolutely certain that the treatment would
make her well. So although it was hard on her and on the children that they couldn’t be together, it never occurred to her or to the kids that she wouldn’t get back home. As for bringing the children to the hospital, it simply was not allowed: only the patient and one other person were allowed to cross at Erez, and Nadia had come with her sister-in-law. Her doctor even thought she’d be moved out of the intensive care unit soon.

Then suddenly, on Saturday, September 13, her vital signs started to plummet. I knew we were losing her. Our children still couldn’t come to see her. Her condition got worse every few hours. She hung on until Tuesday, September 16, at three p.m., when she went into systemic failure and her organs began to shut down. I was sitting beside her, talking to her, calling her name, reading her the Quran. At 4:45 p.m., she slipped away. My wife, the mother of our eight children, was gone.

I couldn’t imagine what I would do, how we would cope. Since it was Ramadan and everyone was fasting, I didn’t want to call home to tell the children until the fast was broken at 5:15 p.m. They hadn’t had anything to eat all day and I knew that once they heard about Nadia they wouldn’t eat at all. So I wanted to wait until I was sure they’d had a meal. Instead, I called the Erez Crossing to arrange for a permit for Nadia so that I could bring her home; even in death, a Palestinian cannot travel without a permit. Then I called the children. Aya answered the phone. She heard my voice and started to scream. I kept saying to her, “God will compensate us.” But all she could say was, “No, no, no.”

There was paperwork to take care of, an ambulance to hire, a car to arrange for the ride to the border. Once there, it was as though a time machine had caught me. The security screen once again listed me as a risk four weeks after the misinformation was supposed to have been removed, so I could not cross the border with Nadia’s body. The Israeli ambulance was to meet the
Palestinian ambulance at the vehicle crossing location, and the security officer suggested I let my wife go on in the ambulance and that I complete my paperwork and walk from the Israeli side to the Gaza side. Of course I had done that many times, but I wanted to be by her side for the whole journey home; I did not want my wife to ride alone. I moved through the paperwork as quickly as possible, and finally persuaded the officer that the restriction on me was an error. I ran through the crossing—at least in the places where running was allowed—and caught up to the ambulance before it reached the Gaza Strip. Nadia and I went the rest of the way home together.

My brothers were waiting. People from all over Gaza had gathered on my street to show their love and sympathy. I went straight to my children, to Bessan, Dalal and Shatha, to Mayar and Aya, Mohammed, Raffah and Abdullah.

That night, we slept together in one room, soothing and gaining strength from each other. The next day, we carried Nadia to the cemetery and buried her there. We prayed all that day, and for three more days. Our friends and family came to console us. Our grief was barely manageable, held in check only because we had each other.

Nadia was a wonderful wife and mother, a woman much cherished by our family and friends. I had known her all my thinking life, she was my muse and my enabler. Only with her loss did I fully understand how much I had taken her for granted all these years. I had been able to withstand the chronic frustrations and fears of our lives because Nadia was my support team. Her reassurance and love was my coping mechanism.

My children and I were scarred by her early loss but we are still consoled by our memories of her strength.

N
ADIA’S DEATH BEGAN A CHAIN OF EVENTS
that altered the lives of my children, changed my career, and challenged my faith.

I stumbled through the fall of 2008, trying to be both mother and father to our children. At first I felt I could not return to work, because my job at the hospital took me away from Gaza from Monday to Thursday every week. Who would take care of the children? On the other hand, if I was without a job, who would take care of any of us?

In my culture, marriage is regarded as the best state of affairs for both men and women. When my wife’s sister Maryam came through the tunnels from Egypt to visit her family during Eid, almost four months after Nadia died, I watched the way she hugged and kissed my son Mohammed. Even though he had his sisters, didn’t he need a mother figure in his life too? I had never met Maryam, who was divorced and older than me. She had been living in Algeria for decades and I’d been away on her earlier visits. But she wasn’t a stranger to my children and I briefly wondered if I should ask her to marry me. I spoke to her brother about
this, and also to Maryam, who said that she was too old for marriage, that she had children and grandchildren of her own.

The kids didn’t see marriage as a workable solution either. Bessan said, “Go to your work. I will take care of the house. Dalal and Shatha will help me.” It would be a lot for my three eldest daughters: eight children to feed and care for and the large apartment to look after. Bessan and Dalal were students at the Islamic University and Shatha was in her last year of high school. But I talked it over with my brothers and they said their wives would help. So I decided to go back to work.

Returning to work wasn’t a perfect solution, but it did turn out to be a welcome diversion from our grief. The girls worked together to run the house and take care of the younger children while I was in Tel Aviv from Monday to Thursday, and I spent those days at the hospital gratefully absorbed with my patients and the medical issues they brought me. Life without Nadia was not normal, but a semblance of routing had returned to our lives.

In late October, 2008, I received a call from PSI that they wanted to offer me a position in Pakistan. This was my chance to get the family out of Gaza for a while, I thought. The stumbling block was that I had to be either in Dubai or Pakistan in a couple of days to meet with senior staff. But the Israelis would take at least ten to fifteen days to authorize exit papers from Gaza through the Erez Crossing to Jordan, where I could catch a plane. It looked like it was impossible. Just then, the Palestinians announced that the Rafah border into Egypt would be opened for a couple of days, so I decided to travel through Rafah to get to Jordan and my flight.

Here were the hoops I had to jump through: first I had to provide extensive justification and indisputable proof to the Interior Ministry of the Hamas government that I needed to travel abroad. (Patients travelling for health reasons, for instance, must
present their private medical reports along with their physician’s referral; needless to say patient confidentiality is a nonexistent concept in Gaza. Gazans working outside of Gaza must prove they have a work permit and a visa for that country. Students must submit proof that they are registered at the university abroad.) I was a step ahead of the usual routine this time in that I knew the border was going to be open. Normally, no one has the luxury of deciding
when
to travel: you wait prepared to travel whenever the border is open, which could be today, tomorrow or next week or three, four months from now.

When the Palestinian Interior Ministry announces over the media, in newspapers and via the Internet that the border is open, chaos erupts. You have to find your name on lists posted by the Ministry of Interior that dictates the hour and the day you need to show up at the collection point to board your assigned bus to travel to the crossing. I will not enumerate the interminable steps and arbitrary decisions that affect a Palestinian’s fate every step along the way; after twenty-four hours of humiliation I was one of the lucky ones who made it onto a plane.

After I completed my interviews with PSI in Dubai, of course I wanted to get home as quickly as I could to my children. But how? When? By way of what city, and through what crossing? I flew to Cairo and stayed there for a couple of days trying to get a permit and a time to cross, then moved to Elarish, about four hundred kilometers from the city, and close to the border so that I could get there as quickly as possible when it opened. My children were on their own, watched over by their aunts and uncles, in our apartment, ninety kilometres away, a drive of an hour and a half at most.

I had to wait in Elarish for about two weeks. I spent the whole time calling everyone I could think of to ask for help simply to return home. One day the Egyptian authorities decided to open
the border so that patients who were being treated in Egypt could go back to Gaza, and I was informed that I might also be allowed to pass. I went to the border and begged, explaining that my children are alone, that they recently lost their mother to leukemia and that they needed their father. But no ears were listening and no hearts were moved. I waited there all day hoping against hope that human kindness would prevail but it didn’t, and I had to return to Elarish.

Many people are stranded at the border like I was for days, weeks, even months. Only the well-to-do can take advantage of accommodations available in the nearby Egyptian towns. The others sleep on the ground just outside the border crossing. You can imagine what the sanitation is like in this situation. It is normal to see hundreds of Palestinian travelers waiting to be allowed to cross, including women, old people, young men and children, all with the same expressions of gloom, frustration, impatience and fatigue. Travelling has become such a miserable experience that no Palestinian does it, except those who absolutely have to: students attending foreign universities, patients needing care unavailable in Gaza, businesspeople attempting to pretend that their world will eventually be normal.