Bowen diary: Doctor family's tragedy
BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen's diary of the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
I don't know how Dr Izzeldeen Abuelaish keeps going.
Everything in his life changed at about 1605 on 16 January. In the space of not much more than a minute, two Israeli tank shells hit his home in Jabalya in the Gaza Strip.
The shells killed three of his daughters and a niece. His story has been reported around the world, but I have just met him for the first time as he was back here in Gaza this morning.
 |  Look at what this family was armed with. Love and education  Dr Izzeldeen Abuelaish |
Dr Izzeldeen's phones (he carries two) hardly stopped ringing. Neighbours and friends came to offer condolences. Reporters queued up for interviews.
He was taking a day away from the bedsides of his daughter and another niece who were evacuated, badly wounded, for medical treatment in Israel.
His family's tragedy got through to the Israeli public like no other in Gaza.
During the war, the deaths of Palestinian civilians at the hands of their soldiers did not much register with them. The attack on Gaza was seen as just, defensive and necessary.
Once ground troops were sent in, the biggest Israeli concern was the safety of their own soldiers.
Daugthers' bedroom
Dr Izzeldeen grew up in Jabalya refugee camp, the biggest in the Gaza Strip.
Like many others, his route out was education. He became a doctor. He studied, among other places, at Harvard University.
For the last eight years he has worked in Israel, as a gynaecologist, returning to his family in Jabalya at the weekends.
 Dr Izeldeen Abuelaish's children in 2001 |
Gaza is a closed world. The vast majority of the 1.5 million people who live here are never allowed to leave. There is no way out by sea or air.
The border crossing with Egypt is restricted to travellers with special permission, and the crossings with Israel are virtually impenetrable for Palestinians.
But Dr Izzeldeen, because of his job, had permission to come in and out.
During the war, because of his fluent Hebrew, he was interviewed by Israeli journalists about Gaza. He has also campaigned for peace.
Dr Izzeldeen lives in a sturdy apartment block, five stories high. He shares it with his brothers and their wives and children. Living in an extended family is the norm for Palestinians.
This morning Dr Izzeldeen showed me around his flat. First, we went to what had been his daughters' bedroom.
He pointed to a bookcase, containing school textbooks covered in dust and bits of plaster.
"Look at what this family was armed with. Love and education," he said.
Then we went to the dining room. At the window he pointed to some deep tracks in the sand outside.
He said that a few days before his daughters and their cousin were killed, a tank had been stationed there.
Dr Izzeldeen phoned his friends in Israel and the tank was moved away.
So he thought they were as safe in their home as anywhere else, because important people in Israel knew that he was there with his children.
And then we went to the room where Bisan, Noor, Aya and Mayar were killed. It is a bright corner room, with windows on two sides. It is as it was on the day of the attack.
Sift through the debris on the floor and you can see that this was a playroom that grew into a study and sitting room for the girls as they grew up.
Mixed with the rubble and shrapnel on the floor is a shell collection, a pink hairbrush, belts, handbags, a fragment of cardboard printed with a Barbie and lots of school books, caked with dried blood.
Two blasts
Dr Izzeldeen is fiercely proud of his daughters. They were all good at school.
Bisan, the eldest, was about to graduate a year early from university. He showed me pictures of a peace camp she went to in New Mexico a few years ago, where she was able to mix with Israeli children.
He said that since the death of his wife from cancer last year, she had been a substitute mother for the younger children. The doctor said several times, through his tears, that she was worth 100 men.
When the first shell came in Bisan was in the kitchen making tea. The girls were doing their homework.
The doctor was sitting talking to his brother Shihab, Noor's father when the first shell hit. In the confusion, with the apartment full of smoke and dust, he thought a bottle of cooking gas had exploded.
Shihab told me that the blast knocked them down. He was hurt by shrapnel. As the men were picking themselves up, Bisan rushed into the girls' room. And then the second shell blasted through the room.
The two fathers rushed to their daughters. Mayar and Noor were sitting where they had been working, still in their chairs. Their heads had been blown off.
The ceiling and walls of the room are still splattered with their blood and brains. When they got in to the room, Aya was lying dead on the floor.
Bisan was still breathing. One of her feet had been severed. She died as they picked her up.
Another of Dr Izzeldeen's nieces, Ghaidar, looked as though she was dead. It was only when she groaned as she was being moved that they realised that she was not.
Dr Izzeldeen got to work on his daughter Shatha who was alive but badly wounded. One of her eyes was hanging out of its socket. In Israel, her father's colleagues are fighting to save her sight.
Doctor's answer
Some people in Israel have suggested that the shells came from Hamas.
I climbed onto to an adjoining roof with Marc Garlasco, who is a weapons expert for Human Rights Watch. He found pieces of a high explosive anti-tank round.
From behind the building you can see through the holes the shells made as they passed through the flat and beyond it to a hill where Israeli tanks were deployed. It was a straight shot.
As Dr Izzeldeen stood in the wreckage of his family's life, I asked him if he still believed in peace.
He said he did, and so did his Israeli friends, but their army and those who gave it orders did not. I put to him Israel's argument, that it was a defensive war provoked by Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.
He answered like a doctor. Hamas and the rockets, he said, were the symptoms of a disease caused by a hundred years of conflict and the denial of freedom to Palestinians.
And his diagnosis? The correct treatment is not to kill innocent people in Gaza.
Other previous diary entries by Jeremy Bowen:
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