An email in English: "My name is Yuval Caspi and I'm the daughter of Dr. Yosef Caspi. You once wrote an article about my father. … I hope you can help me locate it and the date of its publication." I had no idea what this was referring to. The Haaretz archive found it: On July 14, 1995, 30 years ago, I accompanied Dr. Caspi on a visit to the Nasser Children's Hospital in Khan Yunis.
Caspi, the former doctor of an elite IDF unit and the director of the pediatric surgery department at Soroka Hospital at the time, had volunteered to treat pediatric cardiac patients in Gaza. He would transfer some of these young patients to Soroka for treatment, when he was able to obtain the necessary donations.
The search for the long-forgotten article was also like a trip back in a time machine to an equally forgotten reality. Today, Nasser Hospital is at the center of the fighting in Khan Yunis. The wounded and dead are rushed there by the dozens and hundreds daily.
In this war, it's no longer a children's hospital. Hard to say whether it can really be called a hospital anymore, with people dying on the floor there without medicine and the building surrounded by the Israeli army. The hospital director, Dr. Nahed Abu Taima, told Radio A-Shams this week, "We're caught up in a catastrophe."
Nothing remains of what was found then, in the hopeful days of 1995. Dr. Caspi doesn't live here anymore either. His daughter told me he moved to the U.S. not long after that time, far from Soroka and from Nasser. He's 71 now.
And Hani al-Hatum should be 40 today, if he's still alive. In the summer of 1995, Al-Hatum was admitted to Nasser Hospital because of a congenital heart valve defect. He had a forlorn _expression_ and blue lips. His blood pressure threatened to burst the blood vessels in his brain. Mohammed Batash was a younger patient. He was just a baby then. He should be 29 now. Did he survive? He needed a heart transplant. The odds that he got one aren't great.
Israel's military patrols near Al Shifa Hospital compound in Gaza City, amid the ongoing ground operation of the Israeli army against Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in the northern Gaza Strip, in November.Credit: Ronen Zvulun / Reuters
Farid Tartur, from the Bureij refugee camp, is probably no longer alive. His house is surely no longer standing. Back in 1995, he came to the hospital with his baby Yasser, who was in urgent need of a bone marrow transplant. He'd heard that there was an Israeli doctor in the hospital and thought that maybe he would save his son. He had no other way to save him. Are father and son still alive? I highly doubt it.
The children and babies of the summer of 1995 are now Hamas fighters. What other possibilities and opportunities did they have in life? They were born into occupation and grew up under the blockade, with no chance of anything. Maybe right now they are fighting against the army that invaded the remains of their land after their comrades committed the massacre in southern Israel, or maybe they're foraging through the rubble of what remains of their houses.
Since the war began, I didn't dare phone anyone in Gaza. I was afraid that none of my small circle of friends and acquaintances there was left alive. And if they were, what would I say to them? To hang on? To be strong? In the best-case scenario, they are all uprooted, with nothing left to their name.
I think about them a lot. Is there any chance that Munir and Sa'id, two dedicated taxi drivers who are dear to my heart, are still alive? Munir, from Beit Lahiya, recently recovered from a stroke. The last time we spoke, he asked me to try to arrange a work permit for him in Israel, despite his partial paralysis. He could work as a translator for laborers, he suggested. I haven't heard from Sa'id in a long time.
I loved Gaza. Every visit there was a unique experience. The Gazans are different from the West Bank Palestinians. Up until 16 years ago, this was a very warm, compassionate community, a courageous one, with a feeling of solidarity and, of course, one familiar with suffering. In all my years of visiting Gaza, I met not one "savage" or "monster."
I have no idea what the 16 years of the blockade did to it. Now the war is killing it for good. It's not hard to guess what will grow in Gaza in its memory.