For a Palestinian doctor in Gaza, calming the living while preparing the dead goes hand in hand
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GAZA -- Outside the morgue of Kamal Odwan Hospital, hundreds of angry and distraught young Palestinian men try to rush the door when it opens even just a crack. They plead, beg, and shout. And when they pound their fists on the metal door it makes a sound like thunder.
But in a strange and chaotic human equilibrium, those already on the inside push back until the door closes again.
Once it is latched, then, like an airlock, the same process takes place again, but this time on the inside. Now the door to the refrigerated vault swings wide open, and the men press forward for a look inside.
Some are pointing camera phones. Most just crane their necks. They get only a moment before the door swings shut again. Some step back with relief, while others cover their faces with their black and white checked keffiyehs.
In the Israeli-Palestinian war of attrition, this is how the Palestinians on the Gaza Strip identify their dead.
‘Most of these people come to the hospital after they hear the bombardment or news on the radio,’ says Dr. Raed Arini, a Palestinian surgeon here. ‘They come to the hospital to see who was wounded and who was killed, whether they are their friends or their relatives, their cousins, their commanders--their passions lead them to the hospital.’
Arini's face is a mixture of empathy and exhaustion. He looks older than his 30 years--partly, he concedes, because of his volunteer work. A thoracic specialist, he has volunteered for conflict-related medical care for the past three years.
‘I'm often shocked by what I see,’ Arini says. ‘There are days when it seems unendurable. I'm a doctor, but I'm also a human being.’
Unlike most doctors, who wait for patients to be brought into the hospitals after the fighting, Arini often travels to the front lines in Palestinian ambulances, providing lifesaving emergency care before the wounded are even transported.
Arini says during one heated battle in 2004, he didn't have a bullet-proof vest, so he borrowed one from a journalist. He then attempted to reach some wounded Palestinians caught in a crossfire.
But before he could get them he was knocked down by a barrage of rifle fire. When he finally withdrew to a safer area he says he counted more than a dozen bullet indentations in the body armor.
He recalls that his worst day was in October 2004, when he says an Israeli rocket hit a house in Jebaliya. An entire family had been inside, he says, including ten children. (The Associated Press reported at the time that a rocket strike in Jebaliya killed two people described as militants and wounded eight others, six of them described as civilians.)
‘I just fell to my knees,’ he says. ‘They were bleeding, crying out for their mothers. Some were already dead. I became paralyzed. I couldn't do anything.’
Arini says he thought of his own children at that moment. He says trauma work like this leaves no one unscathed.
‘We are psychologically affected by what we see,’ he says of the medical personnel at the hospital, ‘but through our strong will we are able to overcome it.’
After a night like this, he says he will sit alone for an hour in the hospital's garden, a dirt patch edged with decorative loops of coated wire, before going home to his family. The cuffs of his shirt, sticking out from the sleeves of his sweater, are dotted with blood.
‘My wife will have to scrub these,’ he says, smiling weakly after noticing the stains.
Inside the morgue, he pleads with the men to move aside so the bodies of Hassan Asfour and Rami Hanouna, reportedly part of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, can be taken out of the vaults and shrouded for their burial.
News reports say both were killed when an Israeli missile struck their vehicle. Israeli intelligence sources in Gaza say the men were en route to fire rockets into
Israel.
Finally, after some coaxing, the men part. One of the bodies, in a large aluminum tray, is taken from the vault and placed on the floor. At this moment, the dead man's presence in the center of the room seems to suck out all the previous noise and emotion.
He is wearing black jeans and brown jacket stained with blood. His right arm lies at his side while the left is raised over his head, as if shielding himself from the light. He is barefoot and his feet are already rigid, unnaturally white.
News reports had said Asfour and Hanouna were incinerated in the missile strike, but there are no burn marks anywhere, no scorched clothing. In fact, the body seems almost intact -- except for the head. What is left has collapsed onto itself like an empty rubber Halloween mask. Most of the face has been blown away.
Working in silence, Arini and the other medical staff begin to prep the body for a burial. For a regular Muslim burial, a man tells me, bodies are stripped of all clothing, but those who are deemed martyrs are buried in the clothes in which they died. It is, he says, a badge of honor. With strips of white linen, the medical workers bind the man's legs together, then place his arms on his torso and do the same.
They lift the head and place a gauze bandage over the missing part, binding it in place as if trying to stop the bleeding. Arini says later this is simply cosmetic: the face will be exposed before burial and they need to make it less shocking for those who knew him.
A long white shroud is laid out and several men lift the body out of the aluminium tray and place it in the shroud, which quickly turns scarlet in several different places. Blood pools in the center of the tray.
The men do the same with the second body, also intact except for the head and what seems to be bullet entry wounds in the chest. This one is dressed in a camouflage.
One of the men watching -- a relative, someone says -- holds the dead man's hand until Arini pulls it away to be bound with the other.
Arini says when so many rush to the hospital after an attack it does make things chaotic, but tonight there are no wounded whose treatment could be jeopardized. There are only the dead men, Asfour and Hanouna.
‘People want to come and give the farewell kiss,’ Arini says. ‘It does make it difficult to work, but it's part of our daily lives. We have no choice.’
No choice as long as the violence continues; the next evening two more men, also from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, will be killed by an Israeli missile -- shortly after firing rockets into Israel.
‘We won't stop until they stop,’ an Israeli officer is quoted as saying in the Jerusalem Post.
Arini will again spend the night in the hospital's morgue, calming the living and binding the dead.
‘I have to do this,’ he says, ‘they are my brothers.’