Israel’s national murder-suicide pact
Asa Winstanley, Electronic Intifada, May 22 2024
An Israeli father gave a frightening TV interview back in February. Thomas Hand grasped the small palm of his 9-year-old daughter Emily. The girl had been released in a prisoner exchange with Hamas only a few months prior. As she watched on, her father told Israeli interviewer Tali Moreno he had been willing to sacrifice her, in order to further Israel’s genocidal war effort against the Palestinians in Gaza. Speaking of her short time in Palestinian captivity, he said:
The army had to do everything in its powers to destroy Hamas. I realized that she could be bombed, could be shot by friendly fire. That was a price that in my head, I could say: ‘Yeah okay.’ So long as we destroy Hamas.
You can watch the relevant clip in the video above. The interview was with Israel’s state broadacster. Although conducted mostly in English, there are a few exchanges in Hebrew with Emily herself. You can watch a subtitled version of the full interview here. But Hand’s cold-blooded attitude towards his own child is only one example of a wider phenomenon in Israeli society. Many Israelis seem willing to sacrifice their own civilians on the altar of Zionism, and sometimes even themselves too.
Kibbutz Be’eri, clearly heavily shelled with the kind of ordnance only available to Israel
As The Electronic Intifada has reported in detail since the Palestinian military assault that started on Oct 7, Israel that day reactivated its suicidal (and homicidal) “Hannibal Directive.” This military doctrine directs Israeli forces to deliberately target their own people in the event of likely or actual capture by Palestinian or other Arab resistance fighters. The aim is to prevent the resistance from gaining Israeli captives who can be used as leverage in prisoner exchange negotiations. But the policy also seems to be rooted in decades-old Zionist mythology. The Electronic Intifada reported in December on the Israeli military quietly admitting that there had been an “immense and complex quantity” of “friendly fire” incidents on Oct 7. According to Yoav Zitun, military correspondent for Ynet, army command believes “it would not be morally sound to investigate” this friendly fire. Many Israelis seem to agree.
Although the fact of such “friendly fire” is quite openly discussed in Hebrew in the Israeli media, when The Electronic Intifada and other independent outlets, including The Grayzone, Mondoweiss and The Cradle, report on this in English, they have been attacked and smeared by pro-Israel corporate media in the West and by Israeli media in English. The WaPo even tried to outrageously imply that The Electronic Intifada’s accurate coverage, which it did not dispute in substance, was the equivalent of of Holocaust denial.
Although the Hannibal Directive and the fact of an “immense” amount of “friendly fire” on Oct 7 is an open secret inside Israel, there are few dissenting voices speaking out against it. One Israeli rabbi has even intimated that it may be religiously permissible in order to prevent “national shame.” Indeed, there seems to be a large degree of acceptance of the doctrine, the price that society must pay in the course of wiping out the Palestinians in Gaza, a popularly supported war-aim among Israelis.
One opinion poll in November showed that a staggering 94% of Israeli Jews thought that the military was either using the appropriate amount of force in Gaza or not enough force. At that point more than 11k Palestinians had already been killed. As of this writing more than 35k Palestinians have been massacred in the course of Israel’s seven-month genocide in the Gaza Strip, a number thought to be a serious underestimate due to the large number of bodies trapped under rubble.
Although Israelis are split on the issue of a prisoner exchange (relatives of the captives have held regular protests and parliamentary lobbies) popular Israeli acceptance of “friendly fire” has, in some cases, spread even to families of Israeli captives in Palestinian custody. Thomas Hand’s willingness to sacrifice his daughter is not the only example. Nor was the Kan interview the first time that Hand, an Irish settler who arrived in occupied Palestine decades ago, seemed to approve of Emily’s death. Hand had initially been told by the Israeli military that Emily died on Oct 7. In a now-infamous interview with tearful CNN reporter Clarissa Ward, a distraught Hand recounted his elation after being told that his daughter was dead. He said:
I went ‘Yes!’ and smiled. If you know anything about what they do to people in Gaza, that is worse than death. That is worse than death. The way they treat you, she’d be terrified every minute. Death was a blessing.
But Emily was alive. She was released in the prisoner exchange that took place during the short-lived temporary truce in November last year. In an interview with Piers Morgan in May, Hand clarified:
I never ever hoped that she was dead. When I was told that she was dead, I was relieved that she wasn’t going through all this suffering.
Hand’s fear that Emily would be “terrified every minute” during captivity seems to have been misplaced. Although it clearly had been a frightening experience, Emily told the Kan journalist she’d found solace with a fellow Israeli captive, with whom she “laughed all the time,” despite the harsh conditions imposed by the genocidal Israeli siege on Gaza and by the need to flee constant Israeli bombardment. Hand is far from the only Israeli with such a macabre attitude, rooted in orientalist fantasies about Palestinian cruelty and savagery, racist views typical of colonists towards the Indigenous peoples whose land and rights they have usurped.
Natali Yohanan: “Shoot us in the head.”
In Kibbutz Nir Oz (a colonial settlement on the frontier with Gaza), mother Natali Yohanan told the NYT of her family’s experience barricading themselves in their bomb shelter for 12 hours as Palestinian fighters arrived in their home. The so-called “safe rooms” built in every settlement home near Gaza were never intended to keep out fighters; rather they were designed as shelters from rocket fire. So as is typical, the door to Yohanan’s did not lock. Yohanan’s husband barricaded the door with his assault rifle. Blurring the distinction between civilian and combatant, many Israelis are armed, especially in population centers near to Palestinians like the so-called “Gaza envelope.” Recounting their ordeal, Yohanan told the NYT:
The kids were so quiet. They were so afraid. And I told my husband, if you can’t hold on any more, I told him, take your weapon and shoot us in the head, make it quick.
Consideration of a murder-suicide pact seems to have been a not-uncommon Israeli response on Oct 7.
Or Yelin: Claimed wife said “please kill me.”
Guiding media around his former home Kibbutz Be’eri in the aftermath of the Oct 7 assault, Or Yelin (the son of Argentinian settler Haim Jelin, a prominent local politician) said that he was preparing to stab his own wife to death that day rather than let Palestinian fighters capture her. Speaking to Israel’s i24 News he explained:
She told me, ‘Or: if they’re coming for us, you have just a kitchen knife, please kill me before.’ And you know what I will say to her: Yes.
Much like Thomas Hand, who described Emily’s captors as “barbarians,” Yelin justified his homicidal ideation with colonial fantasies about the savagery of Palestinian fighters. Yelin claimed that they would have tortured his wife, adding:
Maybe they will rape her. And after that they will tear her apart and then kill her. This is the reality.
As far as we know, none of the Israelis captured on Oct 7 has been killed by Palestinians. On the other hand, it is thought likely that as many as 70 Israeli captives have been killed by Israel in Gaza, in so-called “friendly fire” during the course of Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign, in addition to what is likely to have been hundreds of Israelis killed by Israeli fire after the Hannibal Directive was reactivated during the Oct 7 assault itself. Furthermore, despite seven months of lurid Israeli fantasies about natives raping their women, there has still not been a single publically identified victim of an alleged Oct 7 rape, living or dead. The Israeli captives seem overall to have been well treated by their Palestinians captors, and almost all of the surviving civilians (and Thai “guest workers”) were released during the brief November truce.
Shani Goren: “take down everyone.”
One of those released prisoners was Shani Goren, a resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Goren gave an interview to Israel’s Channel 12 in February, recounting her experience. On Oct 7 she was shot at by an Israeli attack helicopter, after Palestinian fighters captured her and a group of others. Alongside all the Palestinian fighters, one of the Israeli captives, Efrat Katz, was killed on the spot, while several others were injured. Astonishingly, in her interview Goren actually thanked the helicopter pilot who fired on her, even wishing he’d have returned to finish the job after he ran out of ammunition. The Channel 12 interviewer asked Goren:
If you would meet the pilot now, what would you tell him?
Goren replied:
I would tell him: ‘Thank you – and why didn’t you stay? Also: ‘Why weren’t you there, here, to take down everyone here?’ If one helicopter had fired, everything would be okay. We would never have gotten to Gaza.
In other words, not only did Goren seem to approve of the death by helicopter gunship fire of Efrat Katz, but it even seems that she was willing for the whole Israeli group to die, including herself and two children, if it meant stopping captives being taken to Gaza.
Perhaps the most well known “friendly fire” incident on Oct 7 took place at Kibbutz Be’eri. Due to the survival of two civilian eyewitnesses, it’s the most well documented example so far of Israeli commanders implementing the “Hannibal Directive” on the ground that day. As recounted by survivors Yasmin Porat and Hadas Dagan, Israeli commander Barak Hiram ordered a tank fire on the home of Pessi Cohen, where a group of 15 civilians had been held by Palestinian fighters. Aside from one Palestinian fighter (who surrendered) as well as Porat and Dagan, everyone who’d been in the house was killed in the resulting explosion. The Israeli casualties included 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni, a girl whose photo was later used in Israeli government propaganda to falsely allege that she’d been burned to death by Hamas. After a public campaign by relatives of the dead, the Israeli army opened an investigation in February. Despite that, Netanyahu soon after interviewed Hiram for the position of his military secretary. Any such promotion seems unlikely to happen until after the investigation concludes.
Yet even one of the relatives of the girl who was burned to death on Hiram’s orders told an Israeli TV channel that he was willing to “pay a price,” including killing Israeli civilians, if it would have achieved something on the battlefield. Hatsroni’s cousin Omri Shifroni told IBA news:
I am willing to pay a price: that we will kill our civilians in exchange for something else. But what is the something else? To advance quickly? Why? Why?! Did we with certainty save anyone by shooting a shell here?
What accounts for this widespread, though not unanimous, acceptance by Israelis of what could be understood as a sort of national mass-suicide pact? One Israeli air force colonel described Oct 7 as a “Mass Hannibal” event. A clue is in the name chosen by Israeli army officers to describe the Hannibal Directive. Hannibal was the most famous general to lead the Carthaginians, the North African civilization which the Roman Empire viewed as its foundational nemesis. In the end, he poisoned himself rather than be captured alive by the Romans. It seems likely that the Israeli policy-makers who created the secret doctrine in 1986 chose the name specifically because of its implications of “heroic” suicide. A second clue lies in the fact that the valorization of mass-suicide is ingrained into generations of Israelis by decades of Zionist indoctrination. This phenomenon has been described by Israeli literature professor Yoav Rinon as a belief in “heroic suicide” based on the twin myths of Samson and Masada. Rinon argues in a recent essay for Haaretz:
Samson, the seminal myth of Jewish-religious-nationalist fanaticism, intertwines eros, kitsch and death, the unholy trinity on which fascist romanticism is founded. Contemporary Israeli identity is rotten thanks to these myths.
In the Bible story, Samson is a leader of the Israelites who fights his archetypal enemies, the Philistines. After he is betrayed by Philistine love interest Delilah (who shaves Samson’s hair, robbing him of his miraculous strength) he is captured and blinded by the Philistines. With his eyes gouged out, Samson is brought to Gaza in chains for the amusement of the Philistine lords. Samson pleads with the Israelite god to return his magical strength, so that “with this one act of revenge” he can kill everyone present by bringing down the building on top of them all, including himself. He promptly does so, but not before intoning:
Let me die with the Philistines.
In his essay Rinon traces how this mythical story about the “thuggish” Samson has been embraced in Israel by everyone from the most extreme West Bank settlers to the Israeli army troops amassing to invade modern-day Gaza. Rinon explains:
The entire myth of the biblical Samson leads to his heroic suicide as an exemplar for the greatest and worthiest sacrifice of all, ostensibly one made in the name of God.
However, crucially, Rinon argues that this “heroic suicide” ideal is not “confined solely to religious-nationalist Jewish zealotry.” It also extends to the ostensibly secular-nationalist Israeli public. Rinon argues:
Secular Judaism has an equivalent myth of its own, and education in its light begins in primary school. It’s the myth of Masada.
The legend of the “heroic” mass suicide pact supposedly carried out by the Jewish Sicarii sect at the Roman fort of Masada, near the Dead Sea, is deeply ingrained in secular Israeli culture. Schoolchildren are indoctrinated into the site’s mythology with field trips from a young age, and many Israeli soldiers graduate from basic training at ceremonies held there. “Masada shall not fall again,” has been the Zionist motto since 1948. But the official Masada narrative was in large part invented in the 1960s by Israeli general and colonial archaeologist Yigael Yadin. Between 1947 and 1949, Yadin played a key role in planning and executing the Nakba: the expulsion of the Palestinians to create Israel. In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé documents how, early in 1948, as chief of staff of the pre-state Zionist militia the Haganah (and later of the Israeli military), Yadin carried out “deep invasions” of heavily populated Palestinian areas, including in the city of Jaffa (part of modern-day Tel Aviv) where “houses were randomly dynamited with people still in them.” The result was that Yadin and his accomplices expelled about 800k Palestinians. They and their descendants are still blocked by Israel from returning until today, purely because they are not Jewish.
Aerial view of the Masada archaeological site in 2013.
In the early years of the Zionist state, to help finish the job of those mass expulsions, Israel embarked on a multi-faceted program of fabricating “historical” ties to the land of Palestine for the largely European Jewish settlers. As part of this effort, Yadin turned to “biblical archeology,” a dubious but potentially lucrative profession which had long been practiced by European imperialists in Palestine. Both the Jewish European Zionists and Christian European imperialists (many of whom were also Zionists) had been determined to simplify or fabricate the inconvenient realities of actual archeological findings– or more accurately the lack of such findings, to make the facts fit around the literalist interpretations of the Bible dominant in the West. There’s no historical evidence for the existence of mythical Bible figures like Samson, and according to some archaeologists the “siege” of Masada may not even have taken place at all. The truth is that the official Masada story, as still widely disseminated to Israelis and tourists today, was concocted to suit the interests of the new Zionist state. The invented history goes like this:
In 73 AD, a brave group of about 1k Jewish fighters and their families retreated to Masada, a fortified Roman clifftop redoubt, and there they resisted Roman occupation until the end. After an epic Roman siege, on the brink of defeat, the fighters killed their families then ended their own lives in a mass murder-suicide rather than be captured. The story clearly has resonance with what Hannibal had done 250 years earlier, and with what some Israelis are threatening to do almost 2k years later. But the historical reality was otherwise. Patrick Cockburn reported back in 1997:
Most Israeli archaeologists now accept that what really happened at Masada was very different.
When Yadin excavated the Masada site between 1963 and 1965, there was one glaring problem: they found no mass grave. There was no evidence of any “mass suicide” of the Jewish cult that had captured Masada. One veteran British volunteer of the Masada dig told The Observer in 2013:
It was completely made up, there was no evidence for it.
Today, Masada is one of the largest Israeli tourist attractions and a UNESCO World Heritage site. About 750k annual visitors reportedly attended before 2020, many of them Christian Zionists from North America. It is serviced by a cable car, a campsite and even a museum named after the war criminal Yigael Yadin. Although the words attributed to him by Roman Jewish historian Josephus were almost certainly a literary invention, the speech of Sicarii leader Eleazar ben Yair has a modern resonance today among many Israelis. Josephus claims Eleazar said:
Let our wives die before they are abused, and our children before they have tasted of slavery.
Although these words were fiction, many Israelis seem to have taken them to heart. Israelis like Or Yelin, Shani Goren and Thomas Hand. The hand of Zionism’s myth-makers casts a long shadow. Is it too late for international resistance to Zionism to save Israelis from themselves? And how many Palestinians will they take down with them in the process? The future is yet unwritten.
“We won’t be intimidated,” say London students protesting Gaza genocide
Omar Karmi, Electronic Intifada, May 22 2024
On a late-morning sunny May day in central London, students at the Gaza encampment in the grounds of the School of Oriental and African Studies were slowly stirring. Occupying a small green space between university buildings across from the main entrance, the SOAS encampment comprises some 20 tents. It’s small but remarkably organized. At the front is an information desk with leaflets for passers-by on the Palestinian struggle, on students’ demands, a schedule of upcoming speakers at the encampment, and so on. Inside the camp, there are workshops for the students themselves on anything from Palestinian history and anti-colonial studies to self-defense and yoga, as well as specific areas set aside for studying and cooking. The students there are determined to be in it for the long haul. Brandao, a liberal arts undergraduate who, like everyone else interviewed for this article, only gave a first name, said:
This is just one tactic.
He was keen to emphasize that while the students protesting had specific demands from the SOAS administration to “stop profiting from the oppression of the Palestinian people,” the first priority was to keep the focus on what is happening in Gaza specifically and Palestine more generally.
This is ultimately about ending the genocide, about Palestinian liberation and opposition to all the means by which the continued denial of Palestinian rights has been allowed to continue.
The UK student encampment movement started in late April and spread quickly to over 25 universities, from Aberdeen in the north to Sussex in the south. “Inspired,” in the words of Brandao, by the US student movement, the UK’s encampments have been equally vocal but seen little by way of a police crackdown. One source in London’s Metropolitan Police told The Electronic Intifada that while there was political pressure at the top to crack down on the encampments, the issue was widely seen in police circles as one for university administrations to deal with. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said:
Our role is to keep the peace, not inflame tensions.
From government ministers, however, there has been a greater echo of the official US response, most notably by invoking anti-Semitism. The first reaction by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was to call in vice-chancellors of British universities to tell them to take “personal responsibility” for the safety of Jewish students. And on May 21 Michael Gove, a government minister and a “proud” Zionist, told a Jewish community center in North London that university protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza were “anti-Semitism repurposed for the Instagram age.” Gove, who has been repeatedly criticized for holding Islamophobic views, said:
The encampments which have sprung up in recent weeks across universities have been alive with anti-Israel rhetoric and agitation.
Brandao dismissed such comments as fearmongering by the government and typical of the “false conflation” of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, saying:
We are inspired by our Jewish comrades.
Another student, Seb, a history undergraduate, said the movement was all-inclusive and an “awakening moment” for large parts of a British population watching a genocide unfold in Gaza. She said:
Palestine used to be a predominantly Muslim issue in the UK. Now all walks of life are represented, and people are beginning to realize and object to the UK’s complicity with Israeli crimes.
Generally, said Brandao, the public reception to the encampment at SOAS had been “incredible.” While he was speaking, a woman approached the information desk to ask if students needed water or other supplies, an offer that was politely declined. Inside the encampment, a physical therapist led an exercise workshop for the students focused on “nervous system control and strength building,” offering training on how to maintain physical and mental discipline if confronted with agitators or riot police in demonstrations. There have been some isolated skirmishes at university encampments in the UK, notably at Oxford University, but nothing on the scale seen in the US.
Instead, Britain’s GB News, a Fox-like media outlet, treated viewers to footage of Suella Braverman, Britain’s erstwhile home secretary, being roundly ignored by Cambridge University students at their encampment.
Remarkably Braverman, who while she was in office described mass protests in London calling for a ceasefire as “hate marches” and wanted them banned, tried to present her visit as a free speech issue, a position for which she was later taken to task by another Cambridge student.
Braverman’s abject display was symptomatic of a generation gap that Ibrahim, a SOAS alumnus born in London but whose family is originally from Gaza, said made the current student movement different. On the one hand is a political class of “mediocrities” well-versed in sound bites but unable to handle substantial challenges and with little knowledge outside their own political interests. On the other is a young generation facing broad existential threats from climate change to growing economic inequality that has been forced to tackle such issues head on, both intellectually and practically, and which sees Palestine as symptomatic of an “old and corrupt colonial” order. Ibrahim, who said he had lost 31 distant relatives during the genocide in Gaza, told The Electronic Intifada:
This is run by youth who saw the war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq, who grew up with the Islamophobia of the ‘War on Terror.’
Students, he said, were determined to instill substantial change, reflected in the demands of the university administration. These fall into several categories, including that universities divulge their financial investments, largely drawn from student fees, divest from any companies that are “complicit in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights, including Barclays Bank, Microsoft and Accenture among several others listed in leaflets handed out at the encampment, and boycott Israeli academic institutions like Haifa University with which SOAS has a partnership, and which cooperates with the Israeli state in the violation of Palestinian rights.
There have been some small successes. Cambridge University has agreed to negotiate with students over their demands, while the University of York has announced it would divest from arms companies. These fall far short, however, and students at the SOAS encampment said they were prepared for the long haul. Brandao said:
We are not intimidated, and we are not seeking permission.
Seb echoed the sentiment and said students were prepared to continue regardless of how they are portrayed. She said:
There is no such thing as ‘acceptable’ protest. Disruption is part of protest.
Ibrahim, meanwhile, said he was confident that an inflection point had been reached from which there was no turning back. Recalling remarks in November by Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the US ADL, he fully agreed that supporters of Israel was facing a “major” generational problem, declaring:
I can’t believe I am agreeing with this man! Zionism will never recover from this moment. It has lost our generation. It will lose the next generation. And the old generation will die.
Motherhood during genocide
Ruwaida Amer, Electronic Intifada, May 23 2024
What does it mean to be a mother in Gaza during genocide? For Ola Odeh, 36, from the city of Khan Younis, it has meant losing her 9-year-old son and her husband last October. Odeh said:
My son Abd’el-Rahman was always asking me when we would go to my grandfather’s house. Will there be a truce soon or not? I made him be patient and pray a lot for this war to stop, but I was afraid that the army would target entire residential areas. Abd’el-Rahman went downstairs with his father to sit with his grandfather and his cousins one day last October. My daughter Masa was playing in her room, and I was arranging clothes in my room. Suddenly there was a huge explosion. I felt like I was on the street. I hugged Masa and looked around. There were no stairs for me to go down, so I descended on piles of stones. They took me to the hospital, and I was crying hard. I wanted to see my son.
She would never do so. He died along with his father in the blast. Odeh recalled Masa saying at the time:
Don’t cry, mother. The most important thing is that you are fine and I am with you.
Odeh told The Electronic Intifada:
Losing Abd’el-Rahman was never easy. I feel like my heart is on fire. I cry bitterly every night. He was a very affectionate child. He listened to my words and responded to my requests. I feel that the war made me hate life. The hardest thing is for a mother to lose her child.
Odeh was echoing the thoughts of thousands of mothers whose children have been caught up in the genocidal violence unleashed in Gaza. Of 14.5k children and 9.5k women reported killed, the UN, citing Gaza’s Health Ministry, has confirmed 7,797 child and 4,959 women fatalities in Gaza over the past nearly 8 months, saying there is incomplete documentation for the rest to make a final determination. UNICEF has called Gaza the world’s “most dangerous place to be a child.” Odeh said of Abd’el-Rahman:
I still dream about his future. He was in the fifth grade. He had many interests. He was the first grandchild of my family. They loved him very much. I still see my father’s tears and the pain in his heart over his loss. I don’t know how I can be both a mother and father to Masa. The screams and tears of mothers have never been merciful.
Jawaher Hamid, 45, from Gaza City would likely agree. She lost her son Walid to deadly injuries suffered in a bombing in the Mawasi area west of Khan Younis. She said:
I was working in a school and cleaning its facilities in order to provide my children with what they needed. I was enduring extreme fatigue in order to help my son Walid to build a future for him. I had been hoping to see Walid get married and welcome his children into the family. Last October, I and my seven children fled from the intense bombing and left Gaza City, going to the Bureij camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip. It was not easy. I was displaced in schools, which are the most difficult places to go to. I could hardly get water and food for my seven children. Walid and his brothers were helping me, but they could not bear this extreme fatigue of displacement. When tanks stormed Bureij camp, we were displaced again to the city of Rafah. I recall Walid telling me that he wanted to go to Khan Yunis to sell okra. He went, and he did not return. He came back to me covered in a shroud. When the news came to me, my heart burned with a fire that made me lose the ability to speak.
Walid, my eldest son, was martyred. His passing hurt my heart and his father’s heart. I still have hope that everything I am experiencing will be a nightmare, and it will end. He was buried in a cemetery in the city of Rafah. His sisters, who did not move to the south, did not have a chance to say goodbye to him. They will not visit his grave because it is far from them, and when I return to Gaza City, his grave will be far from it. I feared an Israeli military ground operation in Rafah, which would force me to be displaced a third time. I was praying to God that this would not happen, but it happened. I was displaced while looking behind me at Walid’s grave. I cried a lot. How would I be left with the sounds of tanks? Now I spend my time sitting by the sea. I cannot sit in the tent without Walid. I was hoping to endure all the hardships of war and not lose one of my children.
Alaa al-Qatrawi lost all four of her children together during the Israeli army’s siege of their house next to Dar Al-Salam Hospital in Khan Yunis. Al-Qatrawi, 33, said she had been separated from her husband for about a year. The children lived with their father and visited her weekly. After constantly communicating with them to make sure they were OK since the start of the genocide, al-Qatrawi said she suddenly lost contact with her children in mid-December. She said:
The tanks were standing in front of their house. I waited a long time to check on them, but in March, I received news that the army had surrounded them and arrested their father and uncles and then bombed the house. I lost my four children. I had a dream of being able to travel with them to Dubai and build a life and a future there. The occupation left my heart burning for my children. Each one of them has a story of birth, upbringing, and care. Each one of them has a future and a dream that I hoped they could achieve. Each one of them has friends and family who love them and miss them. Is it possible for a mother to bear it? All of this in Gaza? Unfortunately, we are in an unjust world that has no humanity at all.
Memories that haunt
Hadil al-Barrawi, Electronic Intifada, May 22 2024
I remember when the shelling intensified around our home. It was shortly after Oct 7, and it was when I first realized what we were facing. My colleague, Dr Yousef, had appealed for help through the doctors’ WhatsApp group after they were targeted near us and couldn’t find a way back to al-Shifa hospital. I tried contacting the ambulance teams, civil defense, Red Cross and Red Crescent, but I didn’t receive any positive response as intense bombardment in the area hindered their arrival. It was a sign of things to come. I remember the first case I encountered back then at al-Shifa hospital, where I was undergoing training as a medical intern in the obstetrics and gynecology department. It is as if it happened today, even though it took place 200 days ago.
A newly-married young woman whose house had been bombed, claiming the lives of her husband and everyone else there except her, was in a state of severe shock when she was brought to the hospital. She was first taken to the emergency department, where one of her feet had to be amputated. She also had a fracture in her hand and scars across her body. At the obstetrics and gynecology department, we discovered that she was pregnant but that the fetus had died. It was very difficult to tell her, and she remained in a state of shock after learning the news.
Shortly after that, the Israeli military ordered us to evacuate to the south. It was the morning of Oct 13. When I got to Khan Younis, I immediately started working in the emergency department at al-Nasser hospital, where doctors were urgently needed and where, later, a mass grave was discovered after the Israeli military laid siege to the compound in February. The plight of the Abu Shamaleh family stands out in my mind. The injuries, especially those of their beautiful girls, were extremely severe. Cosmetic surgeons were called in for immediate intervention.
I also remember the hundreds of patients evacuated from al-Shifa Hospital whose wounds had become infected. No attention was given to them, since staff lacked the necessary medications to treat them. Without gasoline and diesel, we had to walk miles to the hospital from where we were sheltering. During night shifts, my colleagues and I would clean the treatment rooms during the few calm moments and sleep on chairs.
A senior doctor there, Abdullah, who was with us on duty those first days, was targeted when he left for home one day. He returned to the hospital as a patient. He stayed in the intensive care unit for a few days before passing away from the injuries he suffered. It is difficult to witness all this pain. But as medical professionals, we are committed to providing care and to remain at our posts whatever the situation. The memories still haunt me.
Niqnaq 