I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (24 page)

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 home. 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.”

Then an Israeli official was quoted as saying I should have left the Gaza Strip before my children were killed. But where were we to go? Mosques, schools—every place was a target. There wasn’t one safe place in Gaza. I stayed at home because I believed that everyone knew which house was mine and because I felt it was the safest place for my family.

The fact is, Israeli tanks were moving from house to house, shelling and destroying homes they said were thought to serve as Hamas positions. By the look of the streets of Gaza in the aftermath, you could be forgiven for thinking that every single home must have been a hideout for armed Hamas soldiers. Everyone on both sides knows that this is absolute nonsense, and I believe the soldiers were driven into overkill by unreasoning fear fostered by so many years of hostilities and prejudice. The troops’ actions even led some of the hard-nosed military supporters within Israel to criticize the IDF for using excessive force.

Following the attack, my friends surrounded me in the lobby of the hospital, where we gathered every day, usually after I’d done one media interview or another. People I had never met also came to show their support for me and their dismay with the military, and some others came to assert that my daughters were merely a casualty of war. Tammie Ronen, a professor of social work at Tel Aviv University, had been working with me to research the effects of conflict-related stress on Palestinian children in Gaza and Israeli children in Sderot, the border town that has been hit by rocket fire during the last eight years. She said, “You cannot let
yourself collapse. You have your living children to take care of.” I saw Anael Harpaz coming toward me. She’d been upstairs with Shatha, holding her hand while the nurses administered pain medication, and now she was here to support me. Anael is the woman who met my children Bessan, Dalal and Shatha at the Creativity for Peace camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I called out to her and said, “Tell these people who my children were.” She was sobbing and saying, “I hope this is a wake-up call. This is such a peace-loving family.”

While I watched over Shatha, Ghaida and my brother in the hospital in Tel Aviv, my three daughters and niece were buried in Gaza. The Quran says the deceased must be buried quickly, and it was impossible for me to get a permit to cross the border in time to be there for them. Even in death we are separated from our beloved ones. And in one more breathtakingly cruel adjunct to this tragedy, I was told that Bessan, Mayar and Aya couldn’t be buried beside their mother because the Israeli soldiers said no one was allowed to go into that area. Their graves are several kilometres away from the Jabalia Camp cemetery where Nadia is buried.

Revenge was on the lips and in the minds of most people I talked to in the days after my daughters and niece were killed. Zeev Rotstein had managed to bring my other children to Tel Aviv and arranged lodgings for all of us near the hospital. Atta, who’d been taking care of my younger children and arranging the funeral for the girls, came too. His daughter Ghaida remained in intensive care with wounds so severe we wondered if she would survive. Shatha needed more surgery to save her eyesight. I remember after one of the operations, Dalal passed chocolates around to the staff and other patients in the hospital; it’s our way of marking a blessed event. We struggled together, my children and I, and I tried to respond to the chorus of people calling for Israeli blood to atone for the deaths of my girls. One said, “Don’t
you hate the Israelis?” Which Israelis am I supposed to hate? I replied. The doctors and nurses I work with? The ones who are trying to save Ghaida’s life and Shatha’s eyesight? The babies I have delivered? Families like the Madmoonys, who gave me work and shelter when I was a kid?

But the cries for reprisals didn’t stop. What about the soldier who fired the deadly volleys from the tank—didn’t I hate him? But that’s how the system works here: we use hatred and blame to avoid the reality that eventually we need to come together. As for the soldier who shelled my house, I believe in his conscience he has already punished himself, that he is asking himself, “What have I done?” And even if he doesn’t think that now, tomorrow he will be a father. He will suffer for his actions when he sees how precious is the life of his child.

To those who seek retaliation, I say, even if I got revenge on all the Israeli people, would it bring my daughters back? Hatred is an illness. It prevents healing and peace.

Shlomi Eldar told me later that our few minutes together on television had left an indelible impression on his viewers. He said: “The broadcast had a huge effect on Israelis who until then didn’t want to hear about anything from Gaza because they were so angry about the eight years of rockets being fired into Israel by Hamas. The majority of Israelis were in favour of the incursion. Now, for the first time, they understood what was happening inside Gaza. I’m told it was Izzeldin’s voice and my face that made the story. I was very close to crying as I listened to his agony. That same agony affected the Israelis who were watching the program. Even the Prime Minister of Israel told me he was crying when he saw this on TV. It wasn’t prime time, but even six and seven months later people tell me they saw it live on TV. I believe those five or seven minutes of television led to the ceasefire.

“Part of the story that fascinated me was the way Izzeldin moved back and forth between being a father and a physician—at one moment weeping about the tragedy, at another demanding his daughter and niece and brother be taken to the Sheba hospital because there were better facilities to treat them there.” I knew I had to get them to the hospital in Israel—the facilities in Gaza lacked for everything and were already overloaded with casualties.

As much as I reached for calm and a larger mission during those terribly dark hours, my thoughts kept drifting back to the girls—those beautiful, innocent daughters of mine. I sat in the hospital, imagining their futures, their weddings, the contributions they would have made to the world. And I thought about how a dream of happiness can turn into a nightmare in a matter of seconds. A person you’ve nurtured for years is lost to you in a flash of destruction. It felt as though they’d been kidnapped from me.

I longed for the day to be replayed: they wouldn’t have been in the bedroom; the rumoured ceasefire would have already been in place. But I also tried to focus on the survivors and how I could help them recover. I looked at it as a believer: God had given me my daughters as a trust and now they were taken back. But I was also consumed with the craziness of this act, the blind stupidity of attacking the citizens of Gaza and claiming the rampage was aimed at stopping the rockets being fired into Israel.

School started again at the end of January, and so after they stayed with me for ten days, I sent the children back to Gaza to stay with my siblings. Raffah was haunted by nightmares and even wet her bed, and Mohammed, too; my son was troubled so deeply he suffered seizures for months after his sisters were killing. During those long days, while my daughter, niece and brother recovered, and before I was able to return to our smashed, empty, sad home in Gaza, my overriding questions were: Why did this happen to us? And what am I going to do about it?

The apartment building I built with my brothers in Jabalia City to house our families. The photo was taken a year after the shelling.

My niece Noor, who died with my three daughters on January 16, 2009.

Aya wanted to be a journalist when she grew up, and was the poet in the family.