Mohammed, the Gazan father with whom La Vanguardia spoke for the first time a week ago, heals the wounds of his heart by writing poems. “He makes me feel better,” he says from Al Awda hospital, the last hospital with an operational maternity hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip. These days he writes about his lost house: “We built a house that housed our dreams, our love, our friendship…”
Since the last time we spoke, this local NGO worker has first become internally displaced – having to leave his home in Jabaliya following the evacuation order of the Israeli army – and since Wednesday, homeless. An Israeli bombing turned his house into rubble. “Our dreams were in that house, all our belongings,” he explains without much time to lament. “The good news is that there was no one. I will build another house again and again.”
“On Sunday we left my house. We walked three kilometers to my sister’s house while they bombed us. It was a horrible situation. We stayed together because we wanted to live as a family or die as a family. Now five families live in the same apartment, we are 35 people,” says Mohammed, who has agreed to tell his story to this newspaper on condition of anonymity due to risks to his safety. He, his wife and his five children are still in the north, but have moved west. He says that the south, whatever Israel says, is not much safer and that many of those who headed to Rafah out of fear are returning home.
Now Mohammed has been supporting medical staff at Al Awda hospital, which houses the only operational maternity hospital in northern Gaza, for several days. Israel has ordered their evacuation, but there is no way to evacuate the wounded. “If it closes, it would be a catastrophe, especially for women. This is the only place that can care for pregnant women,” he explains. “I’ve been here for four days,” he comments while amusingly showing the medical pajamas he’s wearing. “They gave me this because I don’t have any more clothes…” “I’m kind of a community leader, people trust me. We have been working together for 20 years, we are more than friends,” he says.
Mohammed and his people have dedicated themselves to providing all kinds of support to an absolutely overwhelmed, fatigued and terrified medical staff. “I came to encourage my colleagues and my friends to stay in the hospital, because many were leaving,” he says. Especially, they provide them with emotional support: “Every night we sing national songs, I tell them that we have to stay strong and that even if we are afraid for our families we have to keep working, because all Palestinians are our family.” But they have also dedicated themselves to facilitating the return of some of the staff who had left the center. “Today 22 workers have returned and the hospital is operating at full capacity again. A friend has lost his entire family in a bombing and has been left homeless, but he is still here,” he says.
However, the situation is critical and he admits that at this time they lack even the most basic things. “There is not enough gasoline for the generators, there is no medicine, operations are being performed without anesthesia and in stores on the street in front of the hospital. Triage is being done to choose who to save. If they arrive wounded and one has a 50% chance of surviving, but another has 80%, the latter is chosen,” he says in despair.
“We will not move, we will stay to help people. We will not stop working even if the tanks come to our door. This is a humanitarian service. We have no weapons, only medicine for our people,” she insists. The shadow of what happened this week at the Al Ahli hospital, where a shell explosion left hundreds dead, runs through the corridors of Al Awda. Despite the accusations crossed between Hamas and Israel about the responsibility for the attack, Mohammed is convinced that it was not the Palestinian militias. “The Palestinian militants do not have rockets with the capacity to kill so many people, even the most powerful ones do not kill more than ten people, but not hundreds! “They don’t have the kind of weapons to do something like that. If they had, many more people in Israel would have died!” he says.
Mohammed’s dark circles on the other side of the screen speak of long sleepless nights. “I move everywhere, I am a father, a husband, a brother, a friend, a worker… I try to provide water, food, do everything to be strong even if I feel helpless,” he explains while rubbing his forehead with his hand. hand. Living fast may make adrenaline dull the pain and fear, but his family has lost more than just his house since the start of the war. An Israeli bombardment sank the house of his ex-wife, the mother of his two oldest children. But this time the whole family was inside.
“They have found the remains of my ex-wife and her family. We have buried her with her two children, three people in the same grave, because there is no room. This is what takes away my strength, thinking about my children, who have lost their mother. I put my whole life in my house, and when I lost it I didn’t move a hair. But when I think about my children… When I think about if someone in my family had disappeared under my house…”, and the words become a knot.
But once again the Mohammed of positive thinking, that of resilience, returns and firmly states: “I am not going to stop thinking about how to manage my life, I am going to put all my effort into saving my family. There is no safer place than another, so we are going to stay in the north and hope that this will end soon. We insist on staying alive and standing.”
