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?
January 13 was the most difficult day of the ground attack thus far. We couldn’t see outside because the air was so full of debris and dust from the exploding missiles; you couldn’t distinguish day from night. That afternoon there was a loud and persistent knocking at the front door of our apartment building. I didn’t want to answer the door for fear it was a soldier daring us to come outside. But the knocking persisted, and finally I descended the three flights and opened the door. My brother Shehab’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Noor, was standing on the stoop, holding a white flag over her head, her face wet with tears, her eyes wild with fear. I grabbed her and brought her inside. Her family was still at the community centre, but Noor said she couldn’t stand to be there any longer. She told us, “There were fifty people in one room. We were packed in like animals and acting like hostages. It was humiliating, embarrassing, there was no privacy whatsoever. I decided I would rather die in my home than stay there.” So she wrapped a white towel around a stick and made the dangerous trek to our place.
I felt terrible as I had nothing special to feed my niece to celebrate her courage and to welcome her home. My freezer is always full of food, I’m always prepared to feed however many people come to the door, as is the tradition in my family; but with no electricity, the food had all spoiled. She didn’t care. She said, “It’s like paradise here because we’re all together in the family house.”
The next morning, January 14, I saw a tank approaching our building. At first I hoped it had made a wrong turn or was trying to find a space big enough to turn around in. But it came closer and closer. Soon enough it was ten metres from our door, pointing its guns at the apartment that housed my brothers, their wives and our children. The only living things on the street were animals—sheep that had strayed from broken pens and were limping along with a leg missing or bullet holes in their sides, donkeys braying pathetically as blood seeped from wounds on their backs. The tank pointing its guns at my house, surrounded by half-dead animals, looked like the angel of death. I called Shlomi Eldar. He later described that phone call:
“Izzeldin was shouting, he was clearly very afraid and saying, ‘There is a tank in front of our house. They’re going to kill us, please do something.’ I didn’t know what to do. I called the Israel Defense Forces but there was no reply. So I called a radio reporter, Gaby Gazette, gave him the details and said he’d need to go live with the story right away. Izzeldin told his story to him; he was crying on the phone, obviously scared. In the meantime I kept trying to get the IDF on the phone. Taking out Hamas targets was one thing, but attacking the home of a doctor was another. I wanted to make sure they knew whose house they were aiming at.”
Once I was connected to Gaby Gazette, we did an interview live on my cellphone, with the tank at my door and the children clinging to me. I felt a colossal, choking fear for my children, a level of fear I had never experienced before. What if they were killed, what would happen to me? What would happen to them if I was killed? Th
e intensity of the situation was like an elastic band tightening around my forehead, making it hard to think logically. Later Shlomi told me that Gaby was trying to get me to calm down, to be aware of what was going on around me, to be conscious of the details and strong enough for them to broadcast the information clearly and accurately. I really have no memory of the conversation.
Shortly after the interview played on Israeli radio, a military officer called on my cellphone and asked me what was happening. I told him he knew what was happening: an Israeli tank was aiming its guns at my house when only my family was inside. While I stayed on the phone, he called an officer in the field and, as I listened, told that officer to move the tank. Ten minutes later it rolled away. The crisis was over. I was certain now that we were safe.
We then had an odd sort of celebration. With no gas and no electricity, finding fuel for warmth and for cooking had become a huge issue, but we had a forgotten resource. The day before we went to the beach, I had sent Mohammed to get a bag of charcoal so we could cook our lunch at the olive grove. He misunderstood my instruction to buy a kilo of charcoal and he bought five. I was angry with him at the time for not paying attention and spending money needlessly. But now we set up a cooking station outside the apartment door, using that extra charcoal. The children made a cake over the coals and we boiled water for tea. We felt safe, happy and for the moment triumphant.
There was another reason to celebrate, despite the danger we were in. That afternoon I had received a call from Dr. Peter Singer and Dr. Abdullah Daar, both professors in the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto, who urged me to accept a research fellowship there. They had heard about the work I was doing in public health policy and felt I could contribute to the work being done at the university. (What started out as a fellowship ultimately became a five-year appointment as associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.) I had already talked to the children about the potential opportunity to go to Canada, but now I had a firm offer to tell them about. As I look back now at their heartfelt response to the idea of moving to Canada and starting a new life, as I picture their innocent faces looking back at me that late afternoon, I can hardly fathom the event that would alter our lives within forty-eight short hours.
January 15 was a day like all the others during the siege. We couldn’t see what was happening outside very well because the air was full of ash. The apartment was beginning to feel crowded; we were ten. Dalal was at her auntie’s house, but my other seven children, my brother and his daughter Noor were with me. Late that afternoon I lost my temper and told the kids to tidy up their rooms and the rest of the place. The chaos outside was getting to me and though I was aware that I was taking my anxiety out on them, I couldn’t help it. They did as I asked and afterwards said they were going to bed. It was only six o’clock but already dark outside as it was wintertime. I knew they were only going to sleep to escape my distressed mood. I felt terrible that I’d upset them and knew I couldn’t allow them to go to bed unhappy. So I went to the kitchen and prepared a huge meal of shakshuka, made with eggs and tomatoes, which was about all I had left in the pantry—I’d bought fifteen kilograms of tomatoes before the air strikes started—and called them all to come to me from where they were supposedly sleeping on the dining room floor. They asked why I had been so harsh with them and I said I was sorry, that it was a mistake on my part to take out the turmoil I was feeling on them.
None of us slept much that night. The sound of the bombing and the rockets penetrated the house, shook our bones. The phone rang at one a.m.—it was a man from Israeli radio wanting to do an interview. At two-thirty it rang again, this time a call from the Jewish Community Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, asking me to explain what was going on in Gaza. The children heard every word as I replied to the questions and recounted the horror we were living with. I was of two minds about sharing the news with the world and at the same time terrifying my children. The need to alert others to our suffering won out, but the anxiety my graphic descriptions created cost the kids the bit of sleep they might have had that night.
The next morning, January 16, we put the mattresses away and prepared breakfast. Then we discussed what we would eat for the rest of the day, as there was hardly any food of any kind left and there was no way to get to Jabalia Camp where we always bought our food because of the intensity of the tank attacks on every street. We couldn’t go outside or even approach the windows for fear of the shelling. Though we had barrels on the roof for collecting rainwater, retrieving it was a treacherous task, and we’d been rationing water since the attacks had begun on December 27. We only flushed the toilet every few days; no one had taken a shower in two weeks. While we fretted about the food situation, my brother reminded us that he had ducks in his yard down the street and said he would risk fetching two of them for lunch. Bessan wondered how we would prepare the ducks since we couldn’t spare hot water for removing the feathers. Like the issue around recharging the cellphones, we discovered that necessity really is the mother of invention and found a way to skin the ducks, and then served them with rice at about one o’clock that afternoon.
After lunch, we sat together talking about the incursion. The children had dozens of questions: Why would anyone do this to us? When will it stop? What are the leaders saying? I tried to tell them what I knew or had heard on the grapevine over the last few days. I told them that there was talk of a ceasefire. Major General Amos Gilad, the head of the Israeli defence ministry’s security coordination, was moving back and forth between Egypt and Israel trying to broker a ceasefire. While I was trying to reassure the children that the ceasefire was imminent, my private thoughts took a much darker turn. These men who meet in the sanctity of safe government offices are not serious about human life and the turmoil here in Gaza. People are dying every minute; every second is vital in saving lives. Women, girls, boys, innocent civilians are being sacrificed for this leadership. Now they’re saying a ceasefire is delayed until Sunday. People are not important to the leaders from either side. You have to wonder if they have sons and daughters themselves and, if so, how they could let this happen to anyone’s children.
My son Mohammed asked me why there couldn’t be a ceasefire today, right now. He wanted to know more about this man Barak who people said had the power to end the hostilities. My other children, all of us sitting in the circle we’d formed on the dining room floor, asked me about Olmert and what sort of man he is. I’d met Ehud Barak, the minister of defence, at his home in Jerusalem during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot several years before. There’s a tradition during Sukkot of sending two people from each hospital to bring greetings to the prime minister. When I’d introduced myself as a Palestinian doctor from the Gaza Strip, he’d asked me to sit beside him; he wanted to know how I became a doctor and how I managed my life coming from Gaza to work in Israel. We’d sat talking for more than an hour.
I wanted the children to see him as a person rather than a monster, so I went to my desk to find the photo that had been taken of him with me at that meeting, and another of me with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, taken when he was the mayor of Jerusalem and had dropped in to the First World Congress on Labour and Delivery, which I was attending. I showed these photos to the kids and told them that both men had talked to me about coexistence. But how to explain that the men smiling beside me in the photos are responsible for the death and destruction outside our windows? How do people forget their humanity and their larger aims? Why do they break their promises? At the back of my mind was another worry: talk of a ceasefire usually also signals the last violent bombardment of the conflict. Invariably the final hours are the most brutal, and when the soldiers retreat, they leave carnage behind.
With the family all around me, this realization was running through my mind like a storm, but I kept a calm face while we talked about our dreams for the future. Bessan told us about her studies at the university and what she hoped to do when she graduated. Mayar had an important announce
ment: “Aya got her first period this morning. Everyone has to congratulate her on becoming a woman.” This is a momentous occasion in a young girl’s life, and Aya must have keenly felt the loss of her mother, but all of us did our best to reinforce that she’d reached a special stage in her life.
Looking at my children, I was suddenly full of doubt about uprooting them further from the life and culture they’d always known. I’d had another recent job offer, this one from Haifa University. I’d been going to turn it down, but now I asked them which choice they would prefer: to go across the border and live in Haifa or to fly halfway around the world and live in Toronto, Canada. My brothers expressed their view that I should go to Haifa because it would be better to stay close to the extended family, but then Aya repeated her earlier pronouncement, saying, “I want to fly.” As we sat there on the floor of the dining room, we agreed that we would go to Canada. My niece Noor said, “Can I come with you? Can you put me in your suitcase?”
We decided we needed to tell Dalal about the family decision to move to Canada; we had been separated since the beginning of the incursion, and hardly had a chance to speak with her during all that time. She was excited about the news, but she told us how worried she was about each of us and how she wished we were not apart. We assured her we were all safe and said we were certain this madness would be over soon and we’d be together again. After each of her siblings had spoken with her, I reminded them that my cellphone was our only link to the outside and we needed to save the battery. No one wanted to cut the connection with Dalal, and after we hung up—I remember it was 3:30 exactly—we sat together in silence for a long time.