Extract from I Shall Not Hate

Extract from I Shall Not Hate by Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish
Original full-length version published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London
Condensed version © Reader’s Digest (Australia) Pty Ltd 2011

In December 2008, Israeli forces began a 23-day air and ground assault on the Gaza strip, where the widowed Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish lived in an apartment building with his children and the families of his brothers Nasser and Atta. On Friday 16 January 2009, at home with his children because it was impossible for him to cross the Israeli border and work in the Tel Aviv hospital where he practised alongside Israeli doctors, Dr Abuelaish became aware that tanks were approaching. He had no choice but to stay put, hoping his home was safe.

Eventually, we drifted out of the dining room. My daughters Shatha, Mayar, Aya and their cousin Noor went into their bedroom to pass the time. My older girls’ bedroom had an enclosed balcony and an entire wall of windows. The ceiling was covered with stars that caught the light all day and shone in the dark. There were mirrors on the walls, and jewellery cluttered their dressing tables, along with Mayar’s lip gloss—her favourite possession. Their absent sister Dalal’s drafting desk sat in one corner. There was a computer on another desk, and a red Persian carpet from Afghanistan covered the floor. It occurred to me as I watched them from the dining room that, despite the shelling and the loss of their mother, there was a level of happiness in this house, a sense of togetherness that stirred my soul.

 

My daughter Raffah was in the kitchen, rummaging for bread to make a sandwich and her eldest sister Bessan was helping her. My son Mohammed was at the door that leads to the staircase of the building, stirring the charcoal to keep the embers going and trying to direct a bit of heat into our cold, damp house. I was playing with Abdullah, carrying him on my shoulders, touring the house. I was trying to distract him; at the age of six, the situation was almost incomprehen­sible to him.

 

We were in the dining room when it happened. There was a monstrous explosion that seemed to be all around us and a thundering sound that penetrated my body as though it were coming from within me. Suddenly it was pitch dark, there was dust everywhere, something was sucking the air out of me. Abdullah was still sitting on my shoulders. As the dust began to settle, I realised the explosion had come from my daughters’ bedroom. Raffah came running, screaming, from the kitchen, Mohammed stood frozen at the front door. I put Abdullah down, and Bessan ran ahead of me—we wound up at the bedroom door at the same time. The sight in front of me was something I hope no other person ever has to witness.

 

Furniture, school books, dolls, running shoes and pieces of wood were splintered in a heap, along with the body parts of my daughters and my niece. My daughter Shatha was the only one standing. Her eye was on her cheek, her body covered in bloody puncture wounds, her finger hanging by a thread of skin. I found Mayar’s body on the ground; she’d been decapitated. There was brain material on the ceiling, little girls’ hands and feet on the floor as if dropped there. Blood spattered the entire room, and arms in familiar sweaters and legs in pants that belonged to my children leaned at crazed angles where they had blown off the torsos of my beloved daughters and niece. I ran to the front door for help but realised I couldn’t go outside because there were soldiers on the street. A second rocket smashed into the room while I was at the door.

 

I’m not certain who was killed when. My brother Nasser had raced down the stairs after the shell hit, and he got to the door at the same time as my brother Atta and his daughter Ghaida. They were caught by the second explosion. I couldn’t find Bessan and kept calling her name, ‘Bessan, where are you? Tell me where you are so I can help you.’ But she was now dead, along with Mayar. So was Aya and so was Noor.

 

Shatha was standing in front of me, bleeding profusely. I was sure that my niece Ghaida had also been killed, as she lay still on the floor, wounds on every single part of her body. Nasser had been struck by shrapnel in the back and was also on the floor. I wondered who could help us, then I realised I still had a connection to the outside world. I called my friend Shlomi Eldar, the well-known Israeli tele­vision presenter on Israel’s Channel 10, but the call went to his voice mail. I left a message: ‘They shelled my house. They killed my daughters. What have we done?’ All I could think was, This is the end. This is the end.

 

In the meantime, my brother Atta’s wife, Sanaa, had fixed a white flag to a pole and had left the house to find help. Nasser’s wife, Akaaber, went into the street with her. They walked to the refugee camp two kilometres away and told the people there what had happened. Despite the colossal danger, the people from Jabalia all came: friends and old neighbours, the Palestinians we had grown up with and struggled for survival alongside. They came with stretchers and blankets, pushing boldly past the soldiers and tanks, to help my family. It took them about fifteen minutes to get to the house.

The aftermath was carried live on Israeli television. The footage shot around the world and showed up on YouTube. Nomika Zion, an Israeli woman from Sderot, the town that is on the receiving end of Qassam rockets, said: ‘The Palestinian pain, which the majority of Israeli society doesn’t want to see, had a voice and a face. The invisible became visible. For one moment it wasn’t just the enemy who is so easy to hate. There was one man, one story, one tragedy, and so much pain.’

 

This is what happened to me, to my daughters, to Gaza. This is my story.