October 18, 2024
“Your lives will
continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children,
who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”
Dr. Soma Baroud, was killed on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed
the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani
Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis. These were the
last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.
Dr. Soma Baroud
was murdered on October 9 when Israeli warplanes bombed a taxi that carried her
and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan
Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
I am still
unable to understand whether she was on her way to the hospital, where she
worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?
The news of her
murder – or, more accurately assassination, as Israel has deliberately targeted
and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors – arrived through a
screenshot copied from a Facebook page.
“Update: these
are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the
Khan Yunis area ..,” the post read.
It was followed
by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the
list, and the 42,010th on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.
I refused to
believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social
media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of
the Khan Yunis strike.
I kept calling
her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by
a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu
Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.
I had told her
repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio
messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity. “Every
morning,” I said, “just type: ‘we are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.
But she would
skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet
connection. Then, a message would arrive, though never brief. She wrote with a
torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for
her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favorite novels,
and so on.
“You know, what
you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude,” she said on more than one occasion, before she would take the
conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and
just repeat, “Yes .. totally .. I agree .. one hundred percent.”
For us, Soma was
a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked
us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But
her brothers, me included, felt the same way.
I wrote about
Soma as a central character in my book “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter”,
because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza
refugee camp.
The first born,
and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and
expectations than the rest of us.
She was just a
child, when my eldest brother Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic
at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was
introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent
state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a US-supplied
Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.
Two years after
the death of the first Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar,
so that the legacy of the first boy may carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer,
maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.
My father began
his life as a child laborer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army,
then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once
again a laborer; that’s because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza
police force after the war of 1967, known as the Naksa.
A clever,
principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could
to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often
barefoot, stood by him every step of the way.
When he decided
to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and
repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Though
her skin healed, cuts on her fingers, due to individually wrapping thousands of
razors, remained a testament to the difficult life she lived.
“Soma’s little
finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to
remind us, ultimately five boys, that our sister will always be the main
heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been
secured for eternity.
Years later, my
parents would send her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to
Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, though
never her own.
She worked at
Al-Shifa Hospital, at Nasser Hospital among other medical centers. Later, she
obtained another certificate in family medicine, opening a clinic of her own.
She did not charge the poor, and did all she could to heal those victimized by
war.
Soma was a
member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza that truly changed the face of
medicine, collectively putting great emphasis on the rights of women to medical
care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include
psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality, but also the
vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.
When my daughter
Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the war, she told me that
“when aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women – doctors,
nurses, and other medical staff – would surround her in total adoration.”
At one point, it
felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in
Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband,
himself a professor of law, and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable
Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties
ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.
Life, even under
siege, at least for Soma and her family, seemed manageable. True, she was not
allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were
denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness
and seclusion, thus her love affair and constant citation from García Márquez’s
seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or went missing. Her
beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and
breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories
and hope.
“If I could only
find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote
to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband was executed by
an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis.
But since the
body remained missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive.
Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the
area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and to give him a proper burial.
They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to
unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels
to carry on with the grim task.
To maximize
their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between
displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza.
This meant that
Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, traveling, often long distances
on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her
children, following every incursion, and every massacre.
“I am
exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end,
for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”
These simple and
reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the
Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month.
“My heart aches.
Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all
turned into rubble,” she wrote.
“This is not a
story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot
be fully told, however long I wrote or spoke. Seven souls had lived here. We
ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in
Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family,” she continued.
A few days
before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a
half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbors in Qarara. She sent me a
photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also
slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.
There was
nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she
wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic
made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead
kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo,
a small olive tree, a birth certificate ..
My last message
to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I
will do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the
whole family would meet in Egypt, or Türkiye, and that we will shower her with
gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “let’s start planning now.
Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw
the message.
Even when her
name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in
local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please
pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded with her.
Only when a
video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an
ambulance, I thought maybe my sister was indeed gone.
Some of the bags
had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was
pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved
men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts
of agony and despair that accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.
Then, another
bag, with the name ‘Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud’ written across the thick
white plastic. Her colleagues carried her body and gently laid it on the
ground. They were about to zip the bag open to verify her identity. I looked
the other way.
I refuse to see
her but in the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation
of love, kindness and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a
thousand men.”
But why do I
continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me
that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?
My sister Soma
was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.
No more messages
from her.
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