I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey Read Online Free PDF Page B

exhausting. I did it twice a week every week for years.
    On Thursdays on the way home from my hospital job in Israel for the weekend, first I stop at a shopping centre about five kilometres from the border. This is where the Palestinians lucky enough to be allowed to make the trip stock up on everything from brake fluid—for a car that’s so old it needs new parts every few weeks—to foodstuffs, always in short supply in Gaza, Coca-Cola, plastic shoes (there are rarely any leather ones for sale) and flat-screen TVs. To us it feels like the Disney World of shopping before we return to the land that’s closed, where everything is shut down, shut off or shut out.
    At the border, you proceed with luggage, briefcase and sacks of purchases to the first checkpoint and join the lineup at the booth, where you present your passport and papers and submit to a search. The Israeli border officers may take apart every bag and search every pocket or simply give a cursory glance at your person and your goods. There is no way of knowing which treatment you’ll receive and how long you’ll be held up, so there is no way to predict when you’ll arrive home. No means of transportation is allowed beyond the first checkpoint, so when you’re cleared through, you have to walk with your luggage and whatever else you’re carrying to the next stop: a sleek, stainless steel building that looks like a cross between an airline terminal and a prison, which was built in 2004 to screen for what Israel called terrorists. The walk is slightly uphill, a strain on anyone carrying heavy items. This billion-dollar building, with all its X-ray machines, monitoring equipment, special conveyor belts and video cameras, was designed to process 20,000 to 25,000 people a day: workerswho used to cross by the thousands to and from their jobs in Israel, journalists who came in the dozens to file stories on Gaza, aid workers from many humanitarian groups. Since almost no one is allowed to cross anymore, the place is practically empty on this day I’m describing—except for scowling staff, a couple of medical evacuees from Gaza and a single pair of bored-looking humanitarian aid workers. It seems like a giant make-work project for Israeli guards on one side and Hamas loyalists on the other.
    The brand new outpatient clinic, supposedly the catch basin for medical emergencies coming from Gaza, is also in this building, and just as empty—a state-of-the-art facility designed to treat thirty patients an hour, complete with an intensive care unit, paramedics and ambulance services for transfer to Israeli hospitals. It stands like a monument to the intransigence that keeps people apart. (This clinic would finally be opened with great fanfare just two days after my daughters were killed. But everyone knew that Palestinians could not get treatment there since they wouldn’t have permission to cross the border. It was closed shortly thereafter.)
    Inside the terminal, you’re directed to the appropriate counter—women this way, men that way, foreigners here, non-foreigners there. More questions. Then, unless you get turned away, and many do, your papers are stamped and you’re on your way through a series of confusing corridors that challenge anyone with a lot of baggage and leave a sensible person feeling there’s trouble ahead. Which there usually is. Grumpy porters can carry your bags on their luggage carts for part of the way if you’re willing to pay their fee, which changes by the hour, but once out of the terminal, eventually you need to take the bags yourself—no one knows why—over approximately 1.5 kilometres of gravel, rock, dirt and dust that leads to the Gaza side of the border. For equally inexplicable reasons, more porters appear two hundred metresfrom the finish line and hoist your luggage. After paying them about ten shekels a bag (US$2.60), you’re in Gaza.
    Under the irritated gaze of Hamas guards, you haul your bags to the rickety table at the