Shifa hospital: The archive of Gazan tragedy

A world not our own

At a certain point during the past two decades, my mind considered the world as a party that must be held accountable for what is happening both within the confines of the deadly torture apparatus that Israel has built for us in Gaza and at a subconscious level as we absorb everything that befalls us as a further disgrace to our individual and collective pre-national dignity. So, like all Palestinians in Gaza, my feelings of grief, which go hand in hand with a heavy sense of humiliation, have now given way to anger toward the world. It is a defense mechanism to give myself an emotional balance while I and all Gazans groan under the weight of all the grief and humiliation.

In moments when this anger — and perhaps feelings of personal weakness — overwhelm me, I find myself practicing various mental rituals. In one of them, I think, what if we, Gazans, were to force the world to experience something of our eternal torment in Gaza, what would we choose? Personally, I would put them to one of two things.

The first involves experiencing how a sudden airstrike by an F-16 fighter jet on a refugee camp takes shape in one’s mind: the looks exchanged with others in the moments between the bomb being dropped and the sound of impact, one’s vision filled with the orange glow that colors everything around you, how the blast pierces the ears and then solidifies like a concrete block in the head, how it then seeps into one’s limbs like nails coursing through one’s veins toward the heart, making one’s pulse pound with a violence that threatens to shatter the rib cage.

In the following seconds, when one realizes they are still alive, there is a solemnity and dark gloom. But that is soon ruptured by the groans of the wounded or a shrill scream from someone who has discovered that they have lost a loved one and the mobile phone flashlights surveying the rubble. Then, the smell of gunpowder mingled with thick dust begins to spread through the air, and those who will be referred to as “survivors” of the bombing begin to cough.

The second thing I would wish for the world to experience is for them to share a part of our blood-drenched memory, preserved in the archive of the Shifa hospital.

Shifa

Shifa hospital, or Shifa as it is commonly known among Gazans, is not a new word, only becoming known as it was used in news reports in the months of the ongoing massacre.

Since 2000, Israel has been killing Palestinians in Gaza on a daily basis. The only change is in the daily tally of deaths between one period and another. Is it in the hundreds, as is the case in the rounds of genocidal wars and military escalations? Or dozens, as in times of localized invasions and popular  marches toward the borders? Or is it “just” one or two who have fallen during Israel’s routine military activities on the "southern front" during periods that are called in relative terms, when speaking of Gaza, “periods of calm?”

Since the early part of the millennium and even before, the name "Shifa hospital" has been ubiquitous in news coverage as a bureaucratic lexical refrain, having been the main source for the local and international press to report on the majority of victims killed on a daily basis by Israel for a quarter of a century now.

Shifa housed a mortuary where the bodies of martyrs, whether arriving lifeless or breathing their last breath as a result of their injuries within the hospital’s wards, were placed. 

After each death, the following morning, funeral processions would set off from outside the mortuary gates.

This is how, for the past 25 years, Gazan families have come to learn of the martyrdom of their children  at the hands of Israelis within the premises of the Shifa hospital: whether when the bodies of their loved ones — or what remained of them — were unloaded from ambulances or when the doctor came out to tell them “Ehemedu Allah ala koll shei.”

The walls of Shifa, whether at the gates of the morgue and intensive care units, emergency receptions, or in the central courtyard within the medical complex, contain the darkest and most painful moments in the life of every Gazan, to the point where Shifa has become a repository of tragedy rather than a hospital, preserving the archive of the shared bloody memory of the people of Gaza.

During my years of political activism in Gaza, Shifa was the most frequent stop on my daily itinerary. It was where we would transport the wounded from incursions and assassinations carried out by Israeli warplanes in the city center, where we would visit the wounded, and where we would bring martyrs' bodies before returning later to the mortuary gate for their funeral procession.

And because Shifa geographically serves as the heart of Gaza City and the nexus connecting its various parts, it was the gathering point for both official events I attended and for my personal meetings at Delice Cafe opposite its eastern entrance. In short, despite the emotional turmoil it evokes in me, Shifa is deeply rooted in my emotional consciousness and holds a piece of every memory I have from that period.

Nights of blood

In the early 2000s, the Israeli military would conduct sudden nighttime incursions into the eastern areas of Gaza. The streets of the city — without electricity due to a lack of viable alternatives at the time — would sink into complete darkness and movement would disappear. The streets would become desolate pathways between graves in a cemetery. The entire city would seem as if it were a dark courtyard surrounding the Shifa building, which stood at the heart of the city with its bright white lights, while the city’s edges glowed red from confrontations with the invading forces.

On the main roads connecting the red-flashing outskirts of the city to its white-glowing center where the Shifa building stood, nothing would move except the vehicles transporting death and its possibility within the bodies of the wounded. And nothing broke the silence except for the sounds of artillery fire, military aircraft and the wails of the ambulance sirens.

With each incursion, every detail of that scene repeated itself with unbelievable consistency — the same medical teams, people crying or seeking any news about their loved ones in the central courtyard, dozens gathering outside the hospital's main entrance trying to identify the wounded thrown to the ground by the ambulances that had brought them only to rush to leave again to retrieve more just like them.

On the ground floor, the emergency department reception staff would become exhausted and the beds would be at full capacity within one hour of the start of the incursion. As the night progressed, the number of wounded lying on the floor and in corridors would become many times more than the available beds in all wards. And so, the majority of life-saving operations for the wounded would be performed on the ground. Due to the shortage of equipment and the rush to save time, medical personnel would use their teeth to open medical supplies like bandages and syringes held in their trembling hands.

Children were given priority, and doctors had no time to rely on anything but their eyes in determining case priorities or whether a severe case had a chance of survival that warranted the doctor dedicating their effort and time to it at the expense of others.

Everything that happened inside Shifa during those nights seemed like scenes cut out of an impossible nightmare. But these harrowing scenes alone were not the only thing that Shifa inscribed in my allotted part of Gazans’ collective memory. There was something else.

The smell

During the massacres, the floors of the Shifa entrance, the ER, and the path leading to the mortuary  would be soaked in the victims’ blood — both that of the wounded and the dead. The air was thick with the smell of alcohol, iodine and supplies for bandaging wounds and washing away the blood that had coagulated on the bodies of the dead.

After I had spent some time there, the smell would start to make me feel dizzy. The mournful wails of women, children's tears, the heated quarrels between doctors and the families of the injured, all would seep from my ears to my head like phosphoric liquid, expanding like sea foam over my vision. At that moment, all other odors faded away, leaving only the putrid smell of coagulated blood on Shifa’s floors, and the phosphoric flood in my head would turn a bloody red, and I would lose consciousness completely.

This happened to me for the first time when I was 21, when I heard of the martyrdom of my comrade Samer.

Samer was targeted by an Israeli gunboat along with others while engaged in a heroic and desperate firefight with the cruise to divert attention from a rescue operation by an ambulance crew for civilian casualties on Gaza’s coastal road near the Palestinian intelligence building in the Sudaniya area. The gunboat killed him, then turned its weapons on the ambulance crew and the wounded.

My share of the memory

Due to communication network disruptions, as was the case during every Israeli military ground incursion into Gaza, the news of Samer's martyrdom circulated haphazardly after midnight without confirmation of its accuracy.

On that night, I was in the company of another dear comrade, who was one of the first to be randomly selected to have a good enough connection to receive the unconfirmed news about Samer. And so we were among the first to arrive at Shifa to verify the news.

In the hospital’s courtyard, Nader, one of my closest childhood friends from the diaspora before our return to Gaza, sat on a ledge silently crying without bothering to wipe his tears. He was wearing homewear, a sign that he had hurried to Shifa.

I realized that something big must have happened for Nader to be there in such a state, but I chose to verify the news about Samer before approaching him to ask, fearing that, whatever it was, it might affect me as much as it did Nader. This was one of the mental deliberations I had to subject myself to at the Shifa entrance, where I was interrupted by the suggestions of those with me that I, specifically, go to the mortuary to verify if the body there belonged to Samer.

Everything happened in less than a few minutes. I remember recognizing Samer the moment I looked at his face and finding that members of his family had arrived before us. All the drawers of the morgue were open for those present, like me, to verify the bodies’ owners.

Samer was lying on the lower shelf of the refrigerator. As I stood between the open drawers, the smell of alcohol and blood got to me and I became dizzy. I tried to take a step back to steady myself, unintentionally bumping against the open drawer behind me. I turned and saw something that shattered my heart — the body lying there was of my friend Saeed, the ambulance officer who was said to have been martyred with Samer.

As the smell of blood and alcohol intensified and the feeling of dizziness condensed in my head, the sea foam over my eyes changed from its phosphoric color to a deep red, and I completely lost consciousness. The last thing that crossed my mind when I saw Saeed was that I told myself, I now understand why Nader was crying in Shifa’s courtyard.

The end — or our end

Israel started the current genocidal war with the end in mind. In the first two days, it was clear from looking at its aerial bombardment that there was a systematic pattern of targeting bakeries, then moving onto hospitals, so that each hospital had a massacre bearing its own name, followed by appendices to the original massacres due to the repeated targeting of the same hospitals.

The symbolic evil of Israel's actions here was blatant, going beyond targeting the lives of Gazans to the eradication of what keeps them alive: bread and hospitals. As if evil alone was not enough, Israel pursued all evil’s possible allegories.

What can wash away the world’s shame as it witnessed scenes of people living near bakeries in the early days of the war fleeing their homes because Israelis were targeting bread outlets? Or the sight of a mother clinging to her wounded son, refusing to transfer him to a hospital because hospitals are danger zones and active battlefronts?

The massacre at the Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, affiliated with the Anglican Episcopal Church in the southwest of Gaza City, marked a pivotal moment in Gazans' relationship with the world. The world witnessed, in audio and video, the Israeli air force burning a thousand civilians in an instant, without any response that would affect the course of the genocide.

On the night of the massacre, inside the Baptist hospital courtyard, even before the neighboring St. Porphyrius Church was bombed in the hours following, killing dozens inside, every Gazan on earth felt that the world as a whole was conspiring to get rid of them.

The Baptist hospital massacre was lost in the deluge of massacres that followed over the next five weeks until the first raid on Shifa hospital. The Israeli tank line that extended from the city's outskirts toward the hospital seemed like a demonic death procession, harvesting the souls it passed by. Some of these victims were sent to Shifa.

I don’t know of any event or place in modern history that witnessed what Shifa did during that period and what followed — the transformation of a hospital raid into a target of a genocidal war, its courtyard into a multi-layered mass grave.

The harrowing stories poured in from Shifa. After witnessing doctors emerging, shattered, from the operation tents in the courtyard or its devastated wards after performing amputations on children without anesthesia, I wondered: how will we be able to do away with confusion in our relationship with the world?

What is the meaning of the world, in the first place? And what is the purpose of its existence after conducting an amputation without anesthesia on a child who asks before the surgery if their limbs will grow back?

Twenty years ago, on that distant night when I saw Saeed’s face in the morgue seconds after identifying Samer, I thought that was the pinnacle of misery that a person could experience in a single moment. The truth is that that conviction wavered many times in subsequent events. But, since the beginning of this war and with every tragic incident that befalls my loved ones, I recall that night.

In one of the most prominent tragedies that emerged from Shifa, I saw wounded parents examining the faces of children’s bodies wrapped in white shrouds to ensure they did not belong to any of their children, other than those they had confirmed were martyred, and that those who remained were still alive, or at least possibly surviving, under the rubble that harbored a chance of their survival.

For months, the images of those parents accompanied me, some of whom I know personally. Their images always evoked the odors and symptoms I had experienced in Shifa for the first time two decades ago. During this period, my mind was spatially and emotionally detached from my surroundings — it wandered there with those mourners inside the Shifa hospital. In my distant place, the sudden image of a dead child's face being uncovered for their parents is reflected on the faces of all children around me. The only complete idea that flashed in my mind about Shifa and the world was that the latter does not want Shifa as an archive of Gazans' tragedy, but rather a museum of their traces.