A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

In 1985, Huda was fresh out of medical school in Damascus and was considering her next steps. Her family hailed from the port city of Haifa, but the founding of Israel prompted the forced expulsion of its Arab population, leaving her family homeless and destitute. Yet they managed to reconstitute a dignified, happy life in the massive Homs Camp, and the men of the family became involved in various facets of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Huda’s uncle Kamel was killed during an infamous massacre of a refugee camp in 1976. Raised on family histories, Huda decided to join her uncle and work with the PLO in Tunis, their headquarters since fleeing Lebanon in 1982. She luckily was not present when Israeli forces bombed the PLO headquarters a few months after her arrival, a devastating attack that “could have eliminated the whole organization, [and] accelerated their move toward accommodation” (86) with Israel. In 1988, the PLO accepted a compromise whereby a Palestinian state would constitute 22% of historic Palestine, excluding the city of Haifa.

Shortly after surviving the bombing, Huda met her future husband, Ismail, and she joined him in Moscow, where he was completing his graduate studies. He accepted a post in Bucharest, Romania, and the couple had a daughter and son in rapid succession. Huda managed to advance her medical training while serving as the primary caregiver for her young family. They were able to return to Palestine after the Oslo Accords, finding a fractured country where it was extremely difficult to reunite with family members. Locals were also resentful of the “returnees” for taking disproportionately higher positions within the new Palestinian Authority, which was widely rumored to be corrupt. Aware of the many problems surrounding the peace process, Huda did what she could to help people on the ground and thereby advance the Palestinian cause.

As the restrictions in and around Jerusalem became more onerous, Huda decided to pull her family out of the city, but the occupied territories were economically depressed and swarming with Israeli security forces. The stress of worrying about her children caused cerebral hemorrhages, and the stress only became worse when Israeli forces arrested her 16-year-old son for attending protests and throwing stones: 

[Huda] tried to contain her fear, knowing that any attempt to stop the soldiers from taking Hadi could put his life in danger. She imagined them killing him there in front of her, saying it was in self-defense. Huda wanted to hug Hadi, but if she touched him she would fall apart. […] She watched them put zip-ties around his wrists, pushing him out the door and through the garden toward one of the jeeps. It felt as if her heart had left with him (96).

She then divorced her husband when he refused to pay for legal services to secure Hadi’s release. He was being subjected to a military tribunal with an astonishingly high conviction rate, and at his hearing, she noticed signs of torture. He received a sentence of 16 months and a fee, and Huda became a kind of mother to many of his fellow inmates when she visited him in prison. The grim experience of visiting him and seeing the experience of other prisoners revealed that the entire society was “powerless to protect their children” (99).

Back at the school bus crash, Huda and her team are desperately trying to rescue as many children as possible and get them evacuated, although only drivers with special IDs would be able to transport them to the better hospitals in Jerusalem. Ula, the teacher who had saved many children, did not survive. Once all survivors had been rescued, it finally dawned on them that “not a single firefighter, police officer, or soldier had come” (101). Huda learned that most children were being tended to in Ramallah, and once she arrived at the hospital, the parents of the children found out she had been at the crash site and began asking her for information about their children. Huda does what she can to care for the children, who are profoundly traumatized.