[News] "Text Me You Haven’t Died" - My Sister was the 166th Doctor to Be Murdered in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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"Text Me You Haven’t Died" - My Sister was the 166th Doctor to Be Murdered
in Gaza
Ramzy Baroud
October 17, 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.”

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
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/10/8/one-year-of-israels-war-on-gaza-by-the-numbers#:~:text=Israeli%20attacks%20on%20hospitals%2C%20and,defence%20workers%20have%20been%20killed.>
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 repeatedly told her 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 and her fears for her children to poetry, a Qur’anic verse, one of
her favorite novels, and so on.
[image: Dr. Soma Baroud]Dr. Soma Baroud and her niece visit the grave of a
loved one. Photo | X | @ZarefahBaroud

“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 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
survival in a Gaza refugee camp.

As the firstborn 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
a 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 could be carried
on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him
for decades.

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 dignity for his small family. Soma, a child,
often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way.

When he decided to become a merchant, 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, caused by 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 and Nasser Hospital, among other medical
centers. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine and
opened 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 who truly
changed the face of medicine. Collectively, they put great emphasis on
women’s rights to medical care and expanded the understanding of family
medicine to include psychological trauma, with particular emphasis on the
centrality but also 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 give
him a proper burial. Israeli drones would often attack them in the process
of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away and return
with their shovels to continue 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. No
matter how long I write or speak, it is a story that cannot be fully told.
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 her son took 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 her home, which made no
sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave, but she ignored me and instead
kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble: an old
photo, a small olive tree, and a birth certificate.
[image: Soma’s son found this childhood photo of Ramzy on Soma’s shoulders
amid the rubble of thier family home]Soma’s son found this childhood photo
of Ramzy on Soma’s shoulders amid the rubble of thier family home

My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that
when the war was over, I would 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 would 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 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, hoping 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.

Feature photo | Dr. Soma Baroud | Source | X

*Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine
Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with
Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation
<https://www.amazon.com/Our-Vision-Liberation-Palestinian-Intellectuals/dp/1949762440>:
Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books
include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a
Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
<http://www.ramzybaroud.net/>*
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