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.
SIX
Attack
NADIA’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 le
ukemia 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.
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 Isra
eli 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.