Escapees and Voluntary Prisoners

It was another Gaza day, but today I had another doctor that I was bringing out in addition to the usual one. This doctor wasn’t coming to treat patients with the Israeli doctors however, he was coming to be admitted at a hospital in Israel for cancer treatment. I was to drop him off at another hospital we work with after letting off our usual Gaza patients at another hospital. So here I was chit chatting on the drive from Gaza to Tel Aviv with two of the most distinguished medical professionals that live in the Gaza Strip. Many of the governments in the Middle East choose the jobs of citizens based on how well they score in school, and in order to be a doctor in Gaza one must score in the top few percent, so these men were also among the smartest and well educated. These two men are some of the few people that, if they wanted to, could get out of the Gaza Strip, make much more money, live in a much nicer place with all the things we daily take for granted, and certainly be far safer. And still they spoke about what they did as though they could do nothing else, to hear them speak and share their story, their compassion and desire to serve their people was very powerful. The doctor coming for treatment was in obvious physical pain toward the end of the drive but we soon made it to the hospital. Like most things in Israel the hospitals have security, but far tighter than most other places, with guard shacks and armed security at every entrance; they usually search the trunk and in the case of Palestinians their bags as well. This doctor was held up for probably 15 minutes while they checked his permission and searched his things, but when I finally dropped him he off unphased, and as very gracious and thankful as ever.

After dropping the doctor off, I returned to the other hospital where I had dropped off the Gaza patients. After all the tests and echocardiograms were finished for the patients I got them loaded up in my van to return back to Gaza. Before getting in, a father with his son of about 15 asked me if he could run to the hospital pharmacy to buy some medicine for his wife. Understanding their need and knowing how expensive things are in Gaza I told them they could go, but I told them to hurry since the other families were already waiting in the van, and I sent Erica our Gaza coordinator to escort them. When they got to the pharmacy in the hospital mall the father told the son to wait outside while he and Erica ran in to get what they needed. When they came out of the pharmacy they immediately noticed the son was not where they left them. The father turned to Erica and asked where he was, and after a moment of looking around them the father said they should split up to look. The father went one way and Erica the other. After almost half an hour of waiting in the van with the other families I called Erica to find out what the trouble was. She told me the situation and I immediately got out and began to look around the hospital myself. I told Erica that if we couldn’t find the son soon we should call the hospital security to search the hospital grounds for him. After another 15 minutes of fruitless searching I told Erica we would need to have security look for him. Erica called the Father on the phone to let him know, to which he replied “No, no, don’t call security, we’ll be at the van in five minutes!” We immediately realized we had been duped, we thought, like Gaza families commonly do, they were shopping and wanted to trick us to buy more time. Erica and I met up at the van again with the other exhausted families to wait, but again ten more minutes passed. Erica called the father again to find out where they were, only this time the line was dead, they had turned off the phone. We immediately got the attention of the security, many of whom I have become well acquainted with in this work, and informed them of the situation. After sweeping the hospital I met back with them where the disappearance originally took place, at the pharmacy. The pharmacy itself is only ten feet or so from an exit to the main street, and it was at that point we realized that there was no security check for people leaving the hospital. We approached the guard at that entrance, the security asked if he had seen the father and son. The guard said he saw them go down to the street and get in a taxi.

We had no choice but to alert the police and the security supervisor at the border that a father and teenage son from Gaza had escaped into Israel. When we brought the other families back to the border we informed the guard about the situation and he put the crossing point on notice as well (the only pedestrian crossing point in and out of Gaza)…That was the last we heard of them.

Perspectives

The last few weeks when I have done my Tuesday Gaza runs I’ve brought out one of the Gazan cardiac pediatricians. He has come along to learn from and talk with the head of the cardiology department at the hospital, where the children we bring out are admitted. It’s under this Israeli doctors leadership that all of the Gaza children we sponsor are treated. On the hour drive from Gaza to the hospital, the Gazan doctor recalled to me his boyhood spent in an Arab village outside where the now heavily fortified military border is, long before it was constructed. As we drove he would point out places where Arab villages once stood, where his father’s village and farm were, now demolished. One of my favorite ruins along the road, a lonely, one room stone building, seemingly plopped haphazardly in a rolling field, the doctor informed me was once a mosque. In the calmest way I've ever heard an Arab discuss the subject he told me how stupid he thought the Jews were for how they are treating the Gazan people. That day, the mother of one of the sick children got to see her sister for the first time in a decade. One sister lives in Gaza, the other I believe from the West Bank. When the sister from the West Bank heard that the other would be able to leave Gaza for a day, she traveled to the hospital in Tel Aviv to see her for the few hours she would be there.

After we made it to hospital and all the patients were treated and ready to go back to Gaza, I told the Israeli doctor that I would need to call a contact I have at the border to see if a protest was still going on. That day was the 3 year anniversary of the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, a Jewish soldier still held hostage by Hamas, and exploited as a powerful gambling chip. When I picked up the families and doctor in the morning, protesters were standing in front of the gates leading into the Gaza border, and as I found out later, were blocking trucks with humanitarian aid (though the only one I saw while at the border, they let through). Walking through the midst of these protesters with a half dozen Gazan’s, children with severe heart problems no less, would not be possible. So as I was seated waiting for a return call to hear if the protesters had dispersed, the Israeli doctor told me that he had been listening to the reports of the protests all day on the radio. He, also remaining about as calm as I’ve heard a Jew talk about Gilad Shalit, expressed his outrage at how unfair and uncompromising the Palestinians Authorities are and how gracious and compromising the Israel government is to them. He told me to imagine being one of Gilad’s parents, or his brother, what it must feel like for them.