GazaHe would run for a while, then fall to the ground and continue crawling, then get up again. This was prompted by his knowledge that no one would save him if he did not save himself. Jaber kept screaming, “I am injured, I am injured,” hoping that someone would hear him and not die silently and fall prey to being mauled by dogs, as happened to his friends.
20 minutes is the time during which Jaber fled in the battle to save himself after he and other displaced people with him were injured by a missile while they were crossing what the Israeli occupation army called the “safe road” to western Gaza, when the white flags did not intercede for them to pass safely, so those with him were martyred and Jaber remained steadfast until He fell unconscious near the hospital gate.
Two days after Jaber was injured, his brother Muhammad ventured out of Kamal Adwan Hospital to their house to search for food and drink, and on his urgent way back he was hit by bullets from a drone at the corner of the road, so the mother heard someone screaming, “Injured near the gate.” “This is my son,” her tongue said, and her heart believed it, before she ran to him without thinking about the dangers of what she was doing.
She reached him and began pulling him alone, muttering, “I’m coming to you.” She brought him closer to an area where young men were able to help her pull him out, in a legendary scene whose heroine was a woman whose motherhood triumphed over her fear of an army and a military arsenal.
The martyr or the wounded
Muhammad’s injury was extremely serious, and he subsequently underwent surgery by doctors who did not specialize in the type of his injury, but it was an attempt by them to stop the bleeding and keep him alive.
Umm Jaber sat between the bodies of her two injured sons, one on the bed and the other on the floor, as the beds were filled with the wounded. She was shackled by helplessness and crippled by hunger and cold. There was no food, drink, or blankets. The mother took advantage of her children’s nap and went out.
The two young men woke up looking for their mother, only to be answered by one of the young men’s screams, “There is a woman in a black abaya and veil, bleeding near the gate.” Jaber shouted, “It is my mother,” recalling a conversation they had had a few hours ago when he asked her to move to the west of the city, but she refused until he told her, “Or you will bury me here.” Or I will bury you.” She then replied, “God willing, we will find a place to be buried.”
Jaber recalls the horrors of the siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital when, after midnight, the occupation began pursuing a scorched earth policy with fire belts and detonating booby-trapped robots around the hospital. He told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “Missiles like rain rained down on the ocean from every direction.”
Hours later, dozens of vehicles surrounded the hospital and began calling for its director, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, and then called people by name to surrender themselves, but they were not there.
Orders followed to evacuate the medical staff, then the escorts, then the wounded who could walk. Then the nurses were asked to put the wounded on stretchers and the burning of the hospital began.
Jaber narrates the order of events that seem like chapters of a bloody movie in which doctors, patients, and defenseless children were victims. At the threat of weapons, the occupation forced everyone who was in Kamal Adwan Hospital to go out to Al-Fakhoura School, where the checkpoints and investigations were.
The besieged people in the areas surrounding the hospital took advantage of the influx of hundreds of people to leave with them, and they were more than 500 displaced people, says Jaber, who continued, “They brought us 20 individuals, then 20 others, into the interrogation rooms. I was subjected to a harsh interrogation that lasted two hours, during which the soldiers did not take into account the injuries on my body, which was wrapped in splints and did not His wounds dried up, so they deliberately hit me.” He summed up the situation by saying, “God does not taste it for anyone.”
Aggression against wounds
Meanwhile, his brother Muhammad was in the hospital courtyard with about 35 wounded people who were unable to move, and the occupation forces had set fire to the hospital’s upper floors. Muhammad says, “They burned the archives department and the pharmacy, and the fire extended to the laundry. We demanded our papers, treatments, and necessities, and the officer replied, “We burned everything.” something”.
After waiting for 7 hours in the cold of the hospital courtyard without receiving any treatment, the soldiers ordered ambulances to transport the wounded to Al-Fakhoura School, where their injuries did not save them from being subjected to humiliating interrogation.
Muhammad tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net shocking details during the investigation, where the soldiers picked up their phones and forced the patients to curse and insult the resistance leaders, and when some refused, they beat them on the sites of their injuries to make them bleed again.
Muhammad says, “We piled into three ambulances, and every few meters required Israeli coordination. We drove on bumpy, potholed roads, which doubled our pain. We waited at the gate of the Indonesian hospital, waiting for the army’s coordination to cross the checkpoint into western Gaza.”
After long hours of waiting for coordination, the agreement came to undergo another wait at the Israeli checkpoint, where the occupation asked the ambulances to stand aside until they finished searching the displaced people whom they had originally searched and interrogated at Al Fakhoura School.
The ambulance driver carrying intensive care patients told the officer, “The oxygen will run out if we stay longer,” and he replied, “Get out of here.” After another few hours, the officer asked the wounded to get out of the ambulance. Muhammad says, “One of the patients was suffering from a fractured pelvis and extended his hand to one of the soldiers to help him get out of the ambulance. He grabbed him, then dropped him to the ground, and told him, ‘Ask Sinwar to help you.’”
The humiliating journey from Kamal Adwan Hospital until reaching Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City took two full days, during which the wounded did not receive medicine or food, but were exposed to the worst methods of torture and humiliation.
“Embracing my two children and my wife was like entering heaven after hell,” Muhammad kisses his two children who were on his lap during his interview with Tel Aviv Tribune Net. He says, “Meeting with them was a dream for me that I almost lost hope of achieving.”
Assault on women
The atrocities of the occupation army at Kamal Adwan Hospital were not limited to wounded men only. A girl no more than 14 years old narrated her testimony about the occupation army’s assault on her and other women her age, when heavily armed soldiers led them to the bathroom of Al-Fakhoura School, where they were forced to move with them. Their families attacked them at gunpoint.
The soldiers began asking them to take off their veils and lift their clothes, and when the girls refused, they began blatant physical assault on them. Maryam told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “They asked us to confess to the presence of armed men inside the hospital, and then to take out the phones and weapons we had hidden. When we denied that we had anything with us, they did not believe us and began to touch us in a humiliating way.”
Maryam continued narrating what happened with a trembling voice, “The soldiers pulled our hair. He hit my head against the window while shouting, ‘Where are the gunmen’s belongings? Take out what you have.’” as he continued hitting my head.
In the midst of these events, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya was screaming after being beaten. The occupation army forced him to go towards the tank in front of the hospital and began threatening him, “You go to Al-Jazeera and say that this happened to you.” He replied to them, “This is what is happening in the hospital, this is what is happening.” They told him, “Don’t talk like that,” and they continued to beat him.
Maryam, who narrates her testimony to Tel Aviv Tribune, concludes with a sigh, “All of this has happened. I don’t know how I will forget this injustice and oppression.” Then she consoles the child herself, “The truth never dies.”
Taking off the veil or beating
As for Dr. Alaa Abu Okal, who was helping the injured without rest at Kamal Adwan Hospital, she described the difficulty of the scene: “We could not sleep due to the influx of injured people, massacres around the clock. How was it possible for me to abandon my professional duty and leave the hospital?”
She paid the price for this position when she lived through the harshest moments of her life, as she says, during the siege of the hospital, which became an arena of terror, during which she was taken with dozens of her colleagues to Al-Fakhoura School, where she was subjected to a naked and humiliating search.
Abu Okal says, “I was forced to remove my hijab and medical clothing during the search, and the fate of those of us who refused was brutal beatings.”
The doctor describes the displacement route that the occupation ordered her to take to reach western Gaza by saying, “It is not just a distance or a winding road. It is an indescribable journey of torment. I cannot describe it.” Children as young as 5 years old were suffering walking on rough roads amid dust, smoke, and the sound of tanks. It was terrifying. Women left their cargo and others collapsed from fear and exhaustion.
Alaa cannot hide her fear of the unknown fate of her colleagues who were kidnapped and taken to unknown destinations. She holds a great blame for the world that failed to support them, and says, “We have been crying out to the world for 3 months to realize us before we are annihilated. They literally annihilated us and Kamal Adwan collapsed.”