I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity

Tragedy cannot be the end of our lives. We cannot allow it to control and defeat us.

...you shouldn’t hate something you don’t know, because it may turn out to be the bearer of your greatest good fortune.

For any human being, freedom is essential, crucial, to our dignity and our ability to be fully human.

It is true that the sky was always beautiful but I don't remember marvelling at sunset or gazing at the dawn of a new day. Survival does not allow time for poetic reflection.

How come a Palestinian child does not live like an Israeli child? Why do Palestinian children have to toil at any manner of hard jobs just to be able to go to school? How is it that when we are sick. we can't get the medical help the Israeli kids take for granted?

It is human nature to seek revenge in the face of relentless suffering. You can’t expect an unhealthy person to think logically.

Traveling has become such a miserable experience that no Palestinian does it, except those who absolutely have to: students attending foreign universities, patients needing care unavailable in Gaza, businesspeople attempting to pretend that their world will eventually be normal.

The Palestinian mother is the author of the survival story of the Palestinian people. She is the heroine, the one behind the success.

No one has the luxury of deciding "when" to travel; you wait prepared to travel whenever the border is open, which could be today, tomorrow or next week or three, four months from now.

We must speak and move forward as one to achieve our brighter future; we are all living in one boat, and any harm to some people in this boat puts us all in danger of drowning.

Anger and violence in Gaza and among Gazans is completely predictable. In a situation like ours, the absence of violence and anger would be abnormal. All of of us feel angry at least occasionally.

People should know that Palestinians don't live for themselves alone. They live for each other. What I do for myself and my children, I also do for all my family. We are a community.

Gaza 1948: "Gaza was not a refugee camp yet, just a place designated for Palestinian people when the state of Israel came begin. But day by day it filled up with people who had no place else to go to.

Your home, whatever it is, is where feel safe, or at least grounded. To be pushed out of t is to be marked with the scar of expulsion for the rest of your life.

By the age of seven, as an eldest boy, I was expected to help the family with the money." !!!!!!!!!!

was our suffering of any consequence to their consciences? Did they see us as victims> Or were we simply nameless, faceless humans who were in their way?

I am a physician, and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunization program, one that injects people with respect, dignity, and equality. One that inoculates them against hatred.

thundering, fulminating sound that penetrated my body as though it were coming from within me. I remember the sound. I remember the blinding flash. Suddenly it was pitch-dark, there was dust everywhere, something was sucking the air out of me, I was suffocating. Abdullah was still on my shoulders, Raffah came running screaming from the kitchen, Mohammed stood frozen at the front door. As the dust began to settle, I realized the explosion had come from my daughters’ bedroom. I put Abdullah down, and Bessan ran ahead of me from the kitchen—we wound up at the bedroom door at the same time. The sight in front of me was something I hope no other person ever has to witness. Bedroom furniture, school books, dolls, running shoes and pieces of wood were splintered in a heap, along with the body parts of my daughters and my niece. Shatha was the only one standing. Her eye was on her cheek, her body covered in bloody puncture wounds, her finger hanging by a thread of skin. I found Mayar’s body on the ground; she’d been decapitated. There was brain material on the ceiling, little girls’ hands and feet on the floor as if dropped there by someone who left too quickly. Blood spattered the entire room, and arms in familiar sweaters and legs in pants that belonged to my children leaned at crazed angles where they had blown off the torsos of my beloved daughters and niece. I ran to the front door for help but realized I couldn’t go

That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.