Tag: Al Quds hospital

Majda’s story: “Are my children terrorists?”

Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell

31 January 2009

Nadeem family: Mohanned, Majda, Firas, Basher, Tala, Dima
Nadeem family: Mohanned, Majda, Firas, Basher, Tala, Dima

The night of Wednesday, January 14, was the worst night for the people in the Tela Howa area. You’ve already heard Reem’s story, and heard from me that this was the night they began to drop rockets on the Al Quds hospital, with our worst rocket fire occuring Thursday night.

Today I met Majda Nadeem and her children. They live on the third floor of a building beside the crossroads of the main road that leads from Al Quds hospital. I was led to their story via the story of the Al Haddad family, which happened a few hours later and had a much more tragic end.

Majda, who is a poet with her own website, but also the pretty and youthful looking mum of Tala (7), Dima (12), Firas (13), Basher (14), and Mohanned (16), told me the area their building was in was targetted from about 1am that night. They hid in their middle room, away from any outside walls. Early on they thought maybe it was specifically their building being targeted with rockets and about to be destroyed, so they ran down into the street, but then decided it was the next door building and that the street was even more dangerous because the Israeli planes were shooting anything that moved.

So they spent the night awake and frightened, praying, thinking they would never see daylight. At 6am 3 phosphorous shells hit their building, setting their cousin’s ground floor flat on fire, and they realised some of the buildings near them were on fire too. The phosophorus fumes made it almost impossible to breath, and then at 7.30am an F16 plane dropped a missile on the main road beside them (I saw the enormous crater) and the exploding rubble smashed all their windows and doors. Terrified, they fled the building again.

Majda’s husband Nasser and Basher and Firas went to try to get their car, but it wouldn’t start. Majda and Mohanned tried to get the girls away across the street. They got as far as the wall beside the street, and a tank – that could clearly see they were a family group carrying small bags – opened fire on them as they cowered against the wall. Mohanned made it across the street, but Majda dropped the bags and tried to shield the girls. “Mohanned was calling something to me but the attack was so loud I couldn’t hear. I tried to run to him with the girls, but fell on the street. I was injured and bleeding but I crawled over to him.”

By this time Majda couldn’t see where her husband or other sons were, and the mobile wouldn’t work. When she finally got through for a moment, her husband told her he and Basher had been shot, were unable to move, and were lying flat on the street in the hope of surviving the combined land and air attack, in sight of the tanks that had already shot them. Getting her other three children to shelter, Majda tried to call the ambulance, the Red Cross, even a radio station, but the phone wouldn’t work. So she set out to run to Al Shifa hospital for help.

When she said this, I stopped to check I’d understood. Al Quds hospital was 5 minutes away and Al Shifa was at least a kilometre, it takes me about half an hour to walk there from Al Quds. Majda explained that she knew from the radio that Al Quds was under the same attack as they were and there was no way she could make it there alive, nor could anyone there reach them alive, which was in fact true.

Basher's leg
Basher's leg

In the meantime, 13 year old Firas was also going for help for his brother and father, but almost immediately he was shot in the knee by an Israeli sniper. This didn’t stop him however – he covered at least 60 yards, half of them in sight of the tanks, to reach his cousin’s house. His cousin then managed to contact a neighbour who was a doctor with a UN car, and they went into the line of fire and picked up Nasser and Basher and got them to Al Shifa. By the time Majda reached Al Shifa (I still can’t get my head around how she must have felt during that run) her husband was in surgery and her son was also being treated.

Now, she has her two boys safe in her own double bed, each with a bandaged leg. Basher has steel bolts in his – he lost a large chunk of the lower leg to what have been described to me as a large bullet. He was due to enter a kung fu championship, so that’s had to be put on hold, but he was apparently bravely joking with his nurse, during a painful dressing change, that he could still kick with the other leg.

Firas is going to have an operation on Tuesday because his knee needs putting back together to what extent it can be. Mohammed and Hazem, volunteer nurses-in-training attached to Al Shifa, come in daily to care for them. Both boys have lovely smiles, and their mother says they mostly behave well to each other while sharing the bed. Their father Nasser, an engineer with no work for more than two years since the siege allows few building materials in, is still in Egypt being treated. As I understand it, his hip, kidney, and prostrate are all damaged.

Firas with volunteer nurse Mohammed
Firas with volunteer nurse Mohammed

Dima and Tala come in from school while I am there, being treated to the usual coffee and arabic sweets. Such small girls. “Are they terrorists?” asks their mother. “My family cares about all people. We don’t mind if they are from a different country or a different religion. We think all people are the same. That’s what we believe.”

Reem’s Story

Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell

Reem, 21 years old
Reem, 21 years old

Today I met with my friend Reem. She is 21 and works with Mercycorps, and we met when she came to interview me after I arrived on the initial FreeGaza trip. She was so bright and sparkly then, and I know that is still in her somewhere, but right now she is very fragile. She didn’t realise I was back in the country until last Wednesday, when her family was one of the many fleeing attack to Al Quds hospital, and we collided amidst the chaos. Today she told me about what happened to them.

Tuesday night, we had stayed with my uncle elsewhere, because the attacks were so bad. But Wednesday we went home, because it was home. Also we heard that the bombs Israel was using (phosphorous bombs) set things on fire, and we thought if we were in our home we could put out small fires before they burnt everything. We just didn’t realise how bad it was going to get.

Wednesday night was terrifying. The bombing, the shelling – my mother was shaking and reading prayers. We realised how dangerous it was there on the 5th floor, but we were too scared to go downstairs because there were windows all the way and we were afraid the Israeli soldiers or the planes would see us and shoot. My uncle lives on the ground floor, he has two daughters of 6 and 1 1/2, my grandmother lives with him also. He called us and said, come downstairs, but we said we just can’t. Next thing we knew, he’d come upstairs to get us. He actually went all the way up to the 7th floor by accident, and had to come back down to us to bang on our door. So we took blankets and went downstairs with him. We kept thinking – at 4am it will stop. Maybe at 6am it will stop. Because usually the army withdrew by then. We didn’t realise they were just continuing to move towards us this time.

Some hours later, my aunt looked out the window and saw a tank; it was pointing directly at our windows. That’s it, in a moment the shells will hit us directly, we’re dead, we thought. But something happened and it turned away from us. I called Mercycorps and asked them to call the Red Cross and ask for help. But we realised we had to escape immediately, to try to get to the hospital because maybe it was safe. We couldn’t go back to the 5th floor for our day clothes or our passports or IDs. My brother was so worried because if the soldiers got him with no ID, they would shoot him. But everyone in our building said, we have to go NOW. But some of them knew the snipers had just shot a man and his daughter (Haneen Al Batran and her father).

We went outside, we had small children with us – some of the little ones could barely walk but they had to if there wasn’t anyone to carry them. Then I saw you, and the other Red Crescent people coming; my brother was helping my grandmother but she can’t walk, she fell, and he stopped with her though he was sure he would be shot. Then you went to help them, so me and the rest of the family went on into the hospital. But inside, we waited for 10 mins and my uncle and my brother and my grandmother didn’t arrive, and we were sure they were dead. We checked the basement but we didn’t know it had two sides. I started to cry. Mum was shouting at everyone – did you see them, did you see them?

Then I saw my brother and I shouted “where the hell have you been!”

After some hours they said everyone would evacuate from the hospital and go to the UNWRA school, but we had to walk and Israel only gave permission for two ambulances to go with the hundreds of people. It’s a long way and my grandmother can’t walk. I didn’t know what we could do, if she had to stay we wouldn’t leave her. But then we got a wheelchair for her so we could push her. I was carrying someone else’s child because her parents had their other children, she was afraid not to be with them so she cried all the way; she could see how scared we all were. I realised how empty this area of the city was, everything was burning, it was a city of ghosts. I believed they would drop a bomb on us as we walked. But we arrived to the school.

From the UNWRA school, we went to very distant relatives – my uncle’s wife’s relatives. We had nowhere else to go; we stayed three days. We wanted to go home, but we expected after people had left, the army would shell the whole of Tela Howa. After the army withdrew, my father and brother went to check our home and bring our passports and ID. After the ceasefire we went home. But we can still hear shelling from the sea. We think it’s not really a truce, it’s more just a break.

I lost my friend from the WhyNot project – Christine Al Tork. She was really dear to me, she was one of the sweetest girls, kind of smooth and soft. Her parents only had her and her brother, so they took such care of her, and gave her so many opportunities, she took lots of classes and things…she was literally scared to death. She got asthma and then a heart attack, from fear. It was Friday, the day she died. I began to think it would happen to me too, because I was scared to death too. I was so affected by that, my family tried to be very close to me to help me. I looked on Facebook, her friends made an online group for her, and the photos of her after she died affected me so much; one of her father kissing her goodbye for the last time. I couldn’t believe she would never be back.

Then I heard my friend from college, Bissam – her name means spring – was dead. This shock was even worse. I was as pale as Christine after she died. I couldn’t eat or talk. My uncle wanted to wake me out of my shock. He shouted at me – it’s not the time for this – any of us might die at any moment, but we have to try to survive – show some care for yourself, for your family, wake up! I realised I had to find some strength, so I started to eat.

Some of my relatives live in Tuam. Their building was destroyed; six families lived there. My friend’s home was destroyed by shells. Some other relatives had their home burnt, so did another friend. Then yesterday I went to Mercycorps, and I found out my friend Jihan, who worked at Sharek, is dead. I was listening to everyone’s stories and I wanted to escape from reality but it was chasing me. During the attacks, I was calling all my friends every night to say goodbye, I was saying to all of them, please forgive me for any bad things I did. And they would say, Reem, please shut up!

My friends always used to say I was like a character out of a fairy tale, like Snow White or someone, not really living in the real world. After these days, I guess I am in the real world. I can’t watch the news, because the news was us, my life, my friends. All me and family are thinking about now is leaving Gaza.

Those minutes or hours – I literally couldn’t tell you which – when I went out into the street with the amazing Red Crescent medics to meet all the families like Reem’s, who were fleeing for their lives, were a strangely calm time. One of the guys paired up with me, and would quietly say my name and “come” to direct me where we needed to go, firstly with hands in the air but soon holding children and blankets and old people. I saw men crying, children wanting to run from sheer terror and their parents gripping them tight, women clutching babies buried in blankets. We carried several people on stretchers, stopping to bandage the sniper wound of one man on the way.

Towards the end my Red Crescent comrade B realised that we didn’t have his best friend A. He wasn’t answering his phone, and that his building was closest to where the tanks were. He asked me to come and get him (I have this trick of untying my long hair to be clearly visible as a woman, in case it discourages shooting, though in the circumstances I wasn’t convinced it would help) and after an eerie walk through emptiness, we found ourselves within a hundred yards of the tanks. From the next building we called across and discovered several families remained in it but wanted to leave. First they couldn’t find A, but then they did – and I swear he’d slept through the whole thing, with a tank nearly under his window and deafening shelling going on. And we all got back safe.

In these last days, whenever Red Crescent folks from other places turned up on ambulance runs, the greetings were much closer to reunions. Big hugs and 5 or 6 smacking kisses on each cheek. The subtext: “you’re still alive. It’s a miracle, you’re still alive.” E heard today of a third friend who is dead. She has had a hard time. I have lost no-one personal to me.

I have three hangovers that I’m aware of from these days. One, I hate to sleep alone at my flat; the two nights I did during the attacks, it felt too far from the hospital where my work and my friends were and I was worried I would be cut off from them. It still somehow feels like being in the wrong place. Two, I feel happiest when my 3 best Red Crescent friends are all present and within my sight. Three, in the dark when I see bags of rubbish on the street I think they are bodies. This is because I found, when we went to pick up bodies lying in the dark, that they looked more like crumpled bags of rubbish than the people they had been.

The strength of Gaza people astounds me. Everyone was out today fixing things. Re-laying water pipes, clearing rubble. Putting aside the thoughts of the children who are dead, to smile for the children who are still alive. How is it done? Where do they find the courage? And what will be their reward for getting up and going on, one more time?

I forgot to tell you that today again I woke to the sound of shelling from Israeli ships in the Gaza sea.

Jabalia children on wagonload of destroyed trees
Jabalia children on a wagonload of destroyed trees

Saturday January 17 – Starting again

Sharon Lock | Tales To Tell

Let me start with the good news. I found it surprisingly destabilising having to evacuate the hospital. Since the strikes began, I have spent

Washing floor
Washing floor

more nights here than anywhere else, and it began to feel like coming ‘home’ each time I arrived, especially with the welcome I unfailingly received. There is a sense of order in a hospital, of safety and care and compassion. When a handful of us came back to mind the hospital at about 3 am after evacuation, with the remains of the fire still resisting the fire-fighters, it felt very bleak. Beds were scattered in the road; inside, things were overturned and broken after the hurried leaving, the place was covered with mud. In most rooms there were waterfalls. Two out of three of our buildings were blackened and smoldering.

I wandered about in the operations room, clearing things up so it wouldn’t look so sad. If I felt displaced, when I had a perfectly good flat to go to, what about all the medical folks here whose homes have been destroyed in the last weeks, for whom this was their only warm, comfortable, safe place?

But yesterday the Red Crescent met and decided they wanted to work from Al-Quds again, and even better, the hospital will be open on Monday. I forgot to allow for the fact that they have no choice. Today I arrived to a completely revived atmosphere on the ground floor – lights working again, most things back in place, mud washed away, and disaster team boys sliding around their room on a cloth to dry their floor. I haven’t been to visit the bits of the hospital that were burning two days ago. Right now I think I’ll just enjoy what I see. Some of the medics are making us a potato chip dinner. The triplets are now at Nasser childrens hospital, by the way.

So you remember I wrote this about Wed morning Jan 14:

While there, heard shouting, went up stairs to see medic S covered in blood, he had just carried a little girl in from the street who snipers had shot in face and abdomen. We saw her father fall on the hospital stairs, having been shot in the leg. Mother was panicking, shouting there was another girl left behind. S, I and other medics went out to get her, found her not far away, S took her on his shoulders into the hospital. The other medics and I realised they were just the beginning of a stream of desperate people fleeing their buildings, many of which were on fire.

This was the Badran family. Faddel al Badran, 54, was shot in the leg. Yasmine, 12, was the girl we went to bring in. Haneen, 9, was the one shot in the face and abdomen: I knew she had been taken straight into surgery at Al-Quds. today I found out that she was transferred to Al-Shifa and died shortly afterwards.

Last night they bombed another UNRWA school in which homeless people had taken refuge in Beit Lahia. There are 36 wounded, including 14 children. Two boys aged 3 and 8 are dead. John Ging of UNRWA was on the TV being coldly furious. But as I type (I’ll be reading this out over the phone to the UK for uploading) a truce has apparently begun. It is strangely quiet. Everyone desperately wants to hope it’ll have some meaning.

Nine year old girl, shot twice by Israeli snipers as her family sought refuge in Al-Quds hospital, has died

Haneen al-Badran, a nine year old girl who was shot in the face and abdomen by Israeli snipers as her family ran to the AL-Quds hospital in Tel al-Hawa, died at 5pm on January 16th.

The shooting of the al Badran family

The Al Batran Family from Tel Al Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City fled terrified from their homes and attempted to take refuge in Al Quds hospital on Between noon And 1:00PM January 15th, 2009. Israeli snipers stationed directly outside the hospital opened fire on the family. Nine year old Haneen Al Badran was shot through the face and in the abdomen. The father, 54 year old Fadel Al Badran, was shot in the thigh and fell to the ground. 12-year-old Jasmeen, can be seen in the videos above frozen in terror, being carried into the hospital by a medic who ran into the line of fire to retrieve her, and being treated by doctors in the hospital afterward.

Haneen al Badran died of her wounds in Al Shifa hospital at 5pm on January 16th.

The shelling and evacuation of Al Quds hospital
Al-Quds hospital was shelled repeatedly in the early morning and several wings destroyed. At approximately 11:00 PM a wing close to the wards was shelled and caught fire. The patients were all evacuated and transferred to Al- Shifa hospital and a nearby Red Crescent facility despite severe overcrowding.

The first floor of the burnt hospital is still being used as an ambulance depot for the Red Crescent. Doctors hope to have the hospital running on Monday despite fears of further shelling.

Quotes from residents of Tel al-Hawa

They were killing any person they could see in the street. They shot at my next-door neighbor. From the area around here, there are around 25 martyrs. They are still looking for missing people. They shelled a complete part of the hospital. The streets and infrastructure are completely destroyed. The building across the street is still burning, and it was a pharmacy depot. The people fled to seek refuge in Al Quds hospital 200 meters from here. Some of the ambulances were destroyed. I saw with my own eyes the burning, the smoke. This is savagery. I don’t think anyone in his life has ever witnessed such brutality and horror.

– Dr. Assad, Tel al-Hawa

We were in our house in Tel al-Hawa. The Israelis were shelling all around. We were really scared being under fire and not being able to do anything about it. None of the people in our building are resisting, we are all civilians. Our neighbors in the building next to us were injured from the shelling. The Red Cross made arrangements for us to leave but we couldn’t take any of our possessions, not even our identification cards. We left wearing only our pajamas. Outside, a man and his daughter were shot by Israeli Forces, and we were praying not to be shot as well. We stayed an hour in the hospital basement before moving on to the nearest UNWRA School. We walked a long distance, we couldn’t sleep, and some of the people were badly injured. Now we live with relatives. Everything we have is in that house but we can not go back there.

– Tel al-Hawa resident

Quotes from Medical staff and volunteers

The patients from Al Quds hospital were evacuated under white flags. Two or three patients were put in the same bed, and the beds were wheeled across the street for 500 meters or more. Those evacuated included numbered around 40 patients. Three newborn babies were evacuated in their incubators and at least four patients were in critical condition. We evacuated because of a fire which started on the second floor of the building and began to spread. The patients and staff were ready to die from the fire or die from shooting. Hospital medics are now cleaning the hospital, which sustained heavy damage from the attack, in the hopes that we can make it operational again by Monday.

– Dr. Waleed Ramadan

After around 600 people had gone to Al-Quds hospital, they then had to leave again. They thought they had found somewhere safe, but nowhere is safe here. I am accompanying ambulances working out of the first floor of what remains of Al Quds hospital. Since the same locations are often targeted repeatedly, we all fear that the hospital will again come under attack.

– Sharon Lock, an Australian volunteer who participated in the evacuation of the Batran family and the evacuation of the Al Quds hospital