My Sister was the 166th Doctor to be Murdered in Gaza

( Middle East Monitor ) – “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 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

I still don’t know 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 assassination — which was a political murder; Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 166 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…” It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, number 42,010 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 air 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 answered the call.

I had told her repeatedly 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, although never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favourite novels, and so on.

“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she told me 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 per cent.”

For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, although 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 very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.

The first born, 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 an 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.

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Two years after the death of Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy could carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.

My father began his life as a child labourer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again, a labourer, because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the 1967 Naksa (the Six Day War).

A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way. When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Although her skin healed, cuts on her fingers due to wrapping thousands of razors individually, remained as 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, eventually 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 sent her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, although never her own.

She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital and Nasser Hospital among other medical centres. 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 victimised 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 the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality as well as the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.

When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the ongoing 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, 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.

Even under siege, life — 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, hence her love affair with and constant citation of García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or 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. And then…

“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 had been executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis. Because his body was 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. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.

To maximise 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, travelling, 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 cosy new pyjamas, my favourite 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,” she wrote. “Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble.”

She pointed out that this is not a story about stones and concrete. “It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I write or speak. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarrelled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family.”

A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbours in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, 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 what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate…

My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I would do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Turkiye, 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.

Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance did I think that 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 have accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.

Then, another bag, with “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” written across the thick white plastic.

Her colleagues carried her body and laid it gently on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to confirm her identity. I looked away.

I refuse to see her in any way but the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom; someone whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”

But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that 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.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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