<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-top-anchor"></div>
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" lang="en-US" dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/text-me-you-havent-died-my-sister-was-the-166th-doctor-to-be-murdered-in-gaza/288470/">mintpressnews.com</a>
<div class="gmail-domain-border"></div>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">"Text Me You Haven’t Died" - My Sister was the 166th Doctor to Be Murdered in Gaza</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Ramzy Baroud</div>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">October 17, 2024<br></div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>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.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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?</p>
<p dir="ltr">The news of her murder – or, more accurately, assassination, as Israel has deliberately<a href="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." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> targeted</a> and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors – arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest
Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area ..,” the post read.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<img src="https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/GZfJakzaUAAIUcI_edited.jpg" alt="Dr. Soma Baroud" width="326" height="408" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;">Dr. Soma Baroud and her niece visit the grave of a loved one. Photo | X | @ZarefahBaroud
<p dir="ltr">“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.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">As the firstborn and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">To maximize their chances of survival, my sister’s family
decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in
southern Gaza.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“My heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble,” she wrote.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<img src="https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Baroud-2.jpeg" alt="Soma’s son found this childhood photo of Ramzy on Soma’s shoulders amid the rubble of thier family home" width="408" height="229" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">Soma’s son found this childhood photo of Ramzy on Soma’s shoulders amid the rubble of thier family home
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">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?</p>
<p dir="ltr">My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt somewhere in Khan Yunis.</p>
<p dir="ltr">No more messages from her.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Feature photo | Dr. Soma Baroud | Source | X</p>
<p dir="ltr"><em><span id="m_4806016595970921092m_8194724533697117942m_9162536278680111503m_4720970031350216908gmail-docs-internal-guid-467d82e6-7fff-ad35-c7b3-f1b24fd7cab0"><strong>Dr. Ramzy Baroud</strong>
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 ‘<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Our-Vision-Liberation-Palestinian-Intellectuals/dp/1949762440" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Our Vision for Liberation</a>:
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<a href="http://www.ramzybaroud.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> www.ramzybaroud.net</a></span></em></p></div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
<div></div>
</div>
</div></div></div>