More than anything else, on the morning of November 3, 2005, Ahmed Khatib
wanted to buy a tie. “I want to look like a real bridegroom,” he told his
mother and father as he paraded in front of them, proudly smoothing his
hands over his new beige shirt and matching trousers – a bridegroom being
the 12-year-old boy’s idea of the epitome of elegance.
His parents had bought him the clothes as a present to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr,
the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Ahmed was so excited about
the day ahead that he had woken up much earlier than his siblings and, at
dawn, had gone to the mosque to pray and visit the grave of his
grandparents, as is traditional. Afterwards he returned home to help his
mother make morning tea for the family. “He was the one who helped me most
around the house,” Abla, Ahmed’s softly spoken mother, explains while
rocking her youngest daughter in her arms. “He had a gentle character and
knew his sisters were too little to start doing household chores.”
As the family sat sipping their tea, Ahmed kept talking about how he wanted a
tie. “I told him all the shops would be closed. But he insisted that
Nasser’s store would be open,” says Ahmed’s father, Ismail, a tall man with
stooped shoulders and dark stains of anguish circling his eyes. “He was a
good boy and I gave him a few coins to let him go and see.” So Ahmed set off
at a run. As he wound his way through the narrow alleyways of the Jenin
refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank, he picked up his friend Hithem.
When the two boys reached the corner shop on the camp’s outskirts, they found
it shut – as Ahmed’s father had predicted. But there was a crowd of children
in the street letting off fireworks to celebrate the feast, so the two
friends ran to join them and started to play.
Hithem stands anxiously shifting his weight from foot to foot as he points to
the spot opposite the shop where the two boys played that day – a
semi-enclosed area of wasteland that must once have been a row of buildings.
Hithem bites his lip as he remembers what his friend said to him that
morning. “He said, ‘I feel like I’m going to die today.’ When I asked him
why, he said, ‘I don’t know, man. But I feel it.’ I was afraid for him.”
The game the boys played that morning was what kids in Britain call cowboys
and Indians. In Jenin – the refugee camp partially flattened by the 2002
Israeli army assault that left 52 Palestinians dead – it is called army and
Arabs. Ahmed was the Arab, Hithem the army. Hithem was dressed for the part:
his clothes were camouflage and he carried a toy gun. The boys who play
Arabs carry stones and pretend Molotov cocktails, he explains earnestly. At
just before 10am, however, the boys’ game became horrifyingly real.
Earlier that morning, a small unit of elite Israeli soldiers had entered
Jenin in search of a suspected terrorist. When word went around that the
soldiers were there, Palestinian gunmen took up positions on rooftops, and a
larger crowd of children congregated near Hithem and Ahmed. Afraid the
situation would escalate, the Israeli army called in reinforcements. Several
Jeeps full of soldiers and at least one armoured personnel carrier rolled
into the street where the children were gathered, according to eyewitnesses.
As gunmen fired shots at the soldiers, hitting the side of one Jeep, the
children started throwing stones towards the vehicles 130 metres away.
Hithem doesn’t remember why Ahmed dashed out of the protected area where they
had been playing. Perhaps it was to get a clearer view of what was going on;
perhaps it was to toss stones at the soldiers – though Hithem denies this.
But what happened next is something he says he will never forget and “it
hurts” to talk about.
Still crouched behind a wall playing army and Arabs, Hithem says he saw Ahmed
suddenly collapse. Though he did not realise it immediately, his friend had
been shot by Israeli soldiers – once in the head, once in the stomach.
Terrified, Hithem says he tossed his toy gun in the direction that Ahmed lay
and fled. While an older boy scooped Ahmed up and staggered off trying to
reach a hospital, an Israeli soldier approached the children, picked up the
toy gun and left. In an attempt to explain the killing of an innocent child,
pictures of the toy gun they argued he was carrying would later be
distributed to the press, laid out alongside a semi-automatic M-16 rifle to
illustrate how like the real thing it had looked.
Ahmed clung to life for two days. When it was clear the hospital in the
refugee camp did not have the resources to treat such serious wounds, his
father called Abla’s brother Muhammad for help. He lives on the other side
of the so-called “green line” drawn by the 1949 armistice separating Israel
from the occupied territories. So Muhammad is an Israeli citizen and, as
such, could request his nephew be airlifted to an Israeli hospital with
better facilities. Ahmed was flown first to a hospital in Afula and then to
one in Haifa. His parents were refused permission to accompany their dying
son. As Palestinians are subject to travel restrictions, they had to request
a permit to exit the West Bank. By the time this was granted, Ahmed had less
than 24 hours to live.
What happened next made headlines around the world. When it was clear their
son would not survive, Ismail and Abla took the decision to donate Ahmed’s
organs for transplant. Within a day of their son’s life-support machine
being switched off, Ahmed’s heart, lungs, liver and kidneys were used for
transplant operations needed by six desperately ill Israelis – two Arabs and
four Jews – five of them children.
Newspapers as far away as Ottawa and New Delhi carried stories heralding the
Khatibs’ “Gift of Peace” and their “outstanding gesture of humanity”. “The
name of Ahmed Khatib won’t go into the history books alongside that of
Yitzhak Rabin or Yasser Arafat, but it deserves at least a mention,” the Los
Angeles Times wrote. The shooting of Ahmed got barely a mention in the
Israeli media the day it happened, so frequent is the death of a Palestinian
child. But when news of his parents’ decision to donate his organs broke, it
not only made the front page of most Israeli papers, but the country’s
future prime minister Ehud Olmert called Ismail and Abla to thank them for a
“gesture that would produce an atmosphere of deeper connection and goodwill
between Israelis and Palestinians”. After this initial flurry of
heart-warming stories, however, the Khatib family was forgotten as the media
turned its attention back to the daily maelstrom of violence that engulfs
the Middle East.
Yet what happened, not only afterwards but – more incredibly in light of
their subsequent decision – what had happened to Abla and Ismail before
their son was killed, provides a chilling insight into the dynamics of a
conflict that between 2000 and the end of May 2006 has claimed the lives of
1,005 Israelis and 3,512 Palestinians, many of them – 119 Israelis and
695 Palestinians – children.
Our first glimpse of Ismail, Abla, five of their children, and other elderly
relatives is as the family stands huddled together beyond the electrified
wire fence, watchtowers and steel barricades of an Israeli checkpoint
separating the West Bank area around Jenin from Israel. Despite having been
told the previous day that they have permission to pass, the family is kept
waiting beyond this barrier for more than an hour.
As the stalemate drags on, I approach one of the soldiers and ask if he is
aware of the background of the family being kept waiting. He does not reply.
Does he know, I ask, what happened to their son: that he was shot by Israeli
soldiers while playing, and that his parents’ decision to donate the
boy’s organs saved five lives, three of them Jewish? Silence. Does he know
that the Khatib family’s decision was hailed as both “moving” and “noble” by
senior Israeli politicians? Still no response. Growing increasingly
frustrated, I ask the soldier if he had a terminally ill brother, sister,
mother or father whose life depended on a transplant, would he not be
desperately hoping for someone to make the decision of the family standing
before him? Silence. Finally I raise my voice. Does he not feel ashamed at
how he and others at the checkpoint are now treating this family? Still he
says nothing, but in the shadow of his helmet I see one eye twitching
rapidly, the only sign of inner turmoil.
Immediately I feel ashamed for having lost my temper. The soldier is just a
conscript, barely out of his teens. I have only been here a few hours, yet
already I am torn by conflicting emotions that must tear at the conscience
of those not already entrenched in extremist positions.
When the family is finally allowed to pass through, we squash into two cars
and travel to the village of El-Bqa’a in northern Galilee. Here the family
have been invited to a party prepared by the parents of 12-year-old Samah
Gadbaan, to give thanks for their daughter receiving Ahmed’s heart. The
Gadbaan family – Druze Arabs often treated with suspicion and hostility by
Israelis and Palestinians alike – are joined by the parents of Mohammed
Kabua, the five-year-old Bedouin boy whose life was saved by the
transplantation of one of Ahmed’s kidneys. Kayed and Fairuz Kabua have
travelled for many hours with their son from the Negev desert in the south
of the country to thank Ismail and Abla. Samah’s parents, Riyad and Yusra,
also invited the families of the four Jewish recipients of Ahmed’s lungs,
second kidney and liver – split between a seven-month-old baby and the
57-year-old woman. None have chosen to attend.
The father of a four-year-old girl, whose life has been saved by the
transplantation of one of Ahmed’s kidneys, publicly stated afterwards that
he wished the organ “had come from a Jew and not an Arab”. His comments
deeply wounded the Khatib family, and were greeted with outrage by other
Palestinians and many Israelis. Following the outcry, the ultra-orthodox
family fell silent. I will meet them later. But before this, I hear Ismail
and Abla’s extraordinary story.
For the hours they are hunched by my side in the back of a car on the way to
Galilee, the grieving couple are preoccupied only with recollections of
their son. They talk about how he loved to draw and play the guitar. At the
house of the Gadbaan family, Ismail and Abla’s obvious pain amid the joy of
those who welcome them is heart-rending. When Samah and Mohammed’s parents
bring their now-healthy children to greet the couple, others in the room
fall silent at the poignancy of the scene. Samah’s brother suddenly launches
into an impromptu song of gratitude that his sister’s life has been saved. A
parade is then organised to march through the town in honour of the Khatibs,
followed by a formal ceremony and many speeches of thanks in the town hall.
It is a long day.
Back in their home in Jenin the next day, the couple are exhausted. Ismail is
also on edge. He is due to leave early the next morning for Italy, but by
midnight has still not received permission from the Israelis to leave the
camp. He has been invited to attend a peace conference in Milan, one of
several such invitations from abroad, and to meet with a group interested in
helping him set up an organisation he wants to found. It will be aimed at
raising awareness of the need for organ donors, and would also help sick
Palestinians find medical treatment beyond the confines of the occupied
territories. With no prospect of a transplant, his elder brother died of
kidney disease years ago – a crucial factor in Ismail’s decision to donate
his own son’s organs. Ismail is also hoping to finalise arrangements for his
eldest son, Muhammad, to travel to Florence, where he has been invited by
philanthropists to finish his school studies.
“I want to get him out of this place. I would like all my children to study
abroad,” says Ismail. “I want Muhammad to fulfil his brother’s dreams
through education, not by taking vengeance for what happened to Ahmed. I
don’t want my son to become a militant.” It is a legitimate fear. Raised
amid the gun culture of years of warfare, it is the militants of extremist
factions who regularly send suicide bombers into Israel, and whom children
in the camp widely regard as heroes. Within days of Ahmed’s death, pictures
of him were pasted up alongside posters of the many suicide bombers –
martyrs, as those here call them – who have come from Jenin.
Then Ismail begins to speak about his own childhood, spent entirely within
the densely populated refugee camp, established by the UN in 1953 for those
who lost their homes after the founding of the state of Israel. He talks of
being sent to prison at 15 for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, and of
spending a total of five years in jail after that for offences including
throwing Molotov cocktails. He talks of being abused in prison, of being
forced to stand for days with his hands against a wall and a sack over his
head into which someone had urinated. But it is when he and Abla start to
speak of what happened to their family during the 2002 Israeli army
incursion into Jenin that the most disturbing story emerges.
()
Because the couple’s two-storey house stands near the top of a steep incline
from which much of the refugee camp can be seen, it was taken over by
Israeli troops and used as a lookout post. Together with their children and
other relatives and neighbours – 29 in all – the couple were herded into a
small windowless room and kept there under armed guard throughout most of
the military operation. “We had to ask permission to go to the toilet and to
make food for our children in our own house. It was humiliating,” Abla
recalls. But while the women and children were kept like that for a week,
Ismail and a brother were hauled from the room and used as human shields –
pushed into house after house in front of soldiers, testing to see if the
buildings were booby-trapped. In the confusion following one explosion, the
brothers, unhurt, managed to break free. But later Ismail was recaptured and
used as a shield again. This time he was stripped naked to ensure he did not
have a bomb strapped to his body, and his shoulder was used as a gun prop.
Rather than talk about how this made him feel, Ismail describes the fear of
the Israeli soldiers: “One was so afraid he started crying and his
commanding officer shouted, ‘Shape up! You’re not in Bethlehem!’”Amid the
confusion of gunfire, Ismail once again escaped, and this time managed to
flee the camp. Two days later, soldiers released his family and they also
fled Jenin.
“When the fighting finally stopped, I was one of the first to set foot back
in the camp,” says Ismail. “The smell was incredible. There were body parts
spread all over the rubble. Part of our house was destroyed. My children saw
all this. They were extremely affected. They kept asking me questions I was
incapable of answering.”
Ahmed was nine at the time. The following year, Ismail says, his son was
hauled by an Israeli soldier into one of their tanks, given a broom and
ordered to clean it. “Ahmed tried to make a joke of it afterwards,” says
Ismail. “He said the tank was disgusting inside where the soldiers had
dirtied themselves. He said the soldiers had tried to give him biscuits and
crisps. But he told them, ‘I don’t need your stuff. My father can buy me
what I need.’” After listening to the details of such humiliation and
tragedy, I cannot help but ask the couple how they could find it within
their hearts to donate their son’s organs, knowing that because they were in
an Israeli hospital, they would almost certainly go to people of the same
nationality as the soldiers who had shot Ahmed. It is a question many others
in Jenin also asked: the couple’s decision to donate their son’s organs did
not find unanimous support. Anticipating this, and so to safeguard his
family, Ismail sought the approval of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, the most
senior Islamic cleric in Palestine, before telling the hospital of his
decision.
In answer to my question, Abla speaks of the final hours of Ahmed’s life. As
she and Ismail sat beside his hospital bed, she recalls being surrounded by
parents all praying for their sons and daughters. “As we sat reading from
the Koran, the other parents read from the Torah. Then one of these mothers
came over to us and began to pray for Ahmed, and we went and prayed for her
son,” she says, pulling Ahmed’s little sister Takwa tight against her
breast. “We are all mothers and fathers. We all love our children. The
message I wanted to send with what we did was, ‘Stop killing children!’”
Ismail nods agreement and then repeats a practised phrase: “Hope comes from
suffering and we, as a people, have suffered a lot.” When I press him
further, he says: “Look,” with a deep sigh, as if explaining an obvious
truth, “a sense of common humanity is much bigger than any feelings of
bitterness and revenge.” Try telling that to some of those whose lives were
transformed by the action Ismail and Abla took.
The Jerusalem district of Ramat Shlomo lies less than 100 miles south of
Jenin. But the newly built and immaculately maintained suburb seems much
further removed from the virtual slum conditions of the Jenin refugee camp.
It is here that Tova Levinsohn sits cradling her daughter Menuche. Menuche
is four now, and with her golden curls, round cheeks and saucer-like eyes,
she looks like a Botticelli angel. But Menuche did not always look so
healthy. A year and a half ago she suffered sudden kidney failure, after
which she spent three days a week undergoing dialysis.
Menuche was put on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. On November 6,
the day after Ahmed died, the doctors called with the news of an available
organ. “I burst out crying. It was such an emotional moment. They were tears
of happiness,” recalls Tova. Within hours, Menuche was having surgery at the
Schneider children’s hospital in Petah Tiqwa near Tel Aviv.
At one point Tova describes the Khatib family as “messengers of God”. “We
believe God sent them to give us the kidney,” she says. Her husband, Yaakov,
claims he does not recall making the comment about wishing the kidney that
saved his daughter’s life had come from a Jew, not an Arab. “Some people say
I said wrong things. But I don’t really remember,” he said. “Menuche was
still in surgery when I was asked by the media what I thought. I didn’t know
how to react. It was all so shocking. I was so tired I hardly knew what I
was saying.”
Be this as it may, it is the casual comments both he and his wife make
subsequently that signal a sad disregard for the circumstances in which
their daughter received her new kidney. It is six months since Ahmed’s death
as I sit talking with the Levinsohn family, and Tova turns to me looking for
me to jog her memory. “I’m in the process of having a social worker help me
write a letter to the family to thank them,” she says. “What’s their name
again?” And then she adds: “It’s not usual for Arabs to give to Jews, you
know.” Asked how he now feels about what he said, Yaakov says he “didn’t
truly appreciate what they [Ismail and Abla] did at the time. It was a big
thing”. As he speaks, Tova mutters: “They didn’t have any choice, really.”
Then Yaakov continues: “After all you get from Arabs, you know, they are the
enemy, trying to do bad things, and then there they are donating organs.”
Such views, Yaakov explains, have been greatly influenced by the time he
spent in the Israeli army, during which his duties included identifying the
bodies of Israeli soldiers killed in the conflict. “It is a very hard
situation here.” “That’s right,” Tova chips in. “On the one hand we are very
appreciative, but on the other hand they are continuing with their terrorist
attacks.”
Tova is right in that once Ismail and Abla made the decision to donate their
son’s organs, medical ethics meant they could not stipulate to whom those
organs would go; though nor, the couple say, would they have wanted to. This
has meant in the past that donated organs of Israelis killed in suicide bomb
attacks have also gone to save the lives of Palestinians. But it is the
Levinsohns’ seeming inability to look beyond the fact that the donor came
from “the other side” that is most striking. They are not alone in this. The
family of the teenage girl who received Ahmed’s lungs, I am informed, is so
anxious about the reaction of those in their orthodox community to finding
out that she received her transplanted lungs from an Arab child, that they
refuse to be identified. And when I meet the 57-year-old Jewish woman to
whom part of Ahmed’s liver was transplanted, she makes her view clear in
three different ways: “It was not important who the organ come from. I did
not want to know… I just wanted to get the liver… It was my own situation I
was very sad about.”
Ina Rubinstein, her husband and two children moved to Israel from Uzbekistan
16 years ago to escape persecution by nationalist forces there. “It was a
big relief to come here, but then we found things were not so easy here
either,” says Ina, who was just hours from death when the transplant of part
of Ahmed’s liver was performed. The operation did not go well. Ten days
later she received a second successful transplant. “Of course it was a pity
what happened to the boy, and I am grateful to his parents,” Ina finally
concedes. “But the people I really want to thank are the doctors who saved
my life.”
Such grudging attitudes are counterbalanced only by that of the parents of
the seven-month-old girl who received the other part of Ahmed’s liver. Anat
and Amnon Beton called their baby daughter Osher, meaning “happiness”, and
pictures of her cover the walls of the couple’s home in Akko, north of
Haifa. But Osher lived for only two days after her transplant operation.
“It’s a pity. I would have been so proud if my daughter had lived with
Ahmed’s liver,” says Anat. The reason the couple did not attend the
Gadbaans’ party, they explain, was because they are still observing a period
of mourning.
“If I could have gone I would have hugged Ahmed’s mother,” says Anat. “I
would have taken her and told her thank you, told her that her loss gave
life to five people.” Amnon says: “We have friends who are Arab and
Christian. We want peace. It did not matter to us that the liver came from a
Palestinian boy. We are all humans.”
In the months following Ahmed’s death, the Israeli human-rights organisation
B’Tselem wrote to the chief military prosecutor of the Israel Defence Forces
(IDF) demanding a criminal investigation be opened into the shooting.
Soldiers had not used crowd-control measures such as tear gas, but instead
had used live ammunition as the first resort, B’Tselem argued, describing it
as another example of the IDF’s “trigger-happy” policy. According to
witnesses, Hithem’s account that his friend had not been carrying a toy gun
is true – though one said the boys had been throwing stones at the soldiers.
For the past three years, B’Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in
Israel (ACRI) have been petitioning the IDF’s judge advocate general’s
office to open criminal investigations into the killing of every Palestinian
not participating in fighting. In response, the state attorney’s office last
month told the High Court of Justice that military police have been
increasing the number of criminal investigations against Israeli soldiers
suspected of killing “non-combatants”. In the four years to July 2004, it
said, the army had conducted 80 investigations, while during the following
year, 55 new cases had been opened, and in the nine months after that, 40.
The reason for this increase in investigations, it said, was that a
lessening in Palestinian violence meant less reason for civilians to be
hurt. Human-rights workers argue a different case. They say there has been
an escalation in Israeli military action since last autumn, when Israel
resumed targeted killings, and an even further increase since Hamas came to
power this year. Such violence is widely viewed as a form of collective
punishment for a people who voted in a party that refuses to recognise the
state of Israel’s right to exist.
But even this increase in the number of criminal investigations means that of
the 3,512 Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces from September
2000 to May 2006 – more than half of whom are believed not to have been
participating in fighting when they died – only 175 investigations have been
opened. Of this total, 19 cases, involving the deaths of 26 people, went to
court, and seven of these resulted in convictions; six on charges such as
illegal use of a weapon. The number of convictions on the charge of
manslaughter: one – a situation that B’Tselem argues amounts to a “de facto
climate of impunity” for killing civilians.
As to the killing of Ahmed, the IDF say that while they “regret” the
shooting, they can find “no justification” to open an investigation. Puzzled
that their written response to my inquiry – B’Tselem is still waiting for a
reply to their demand – refers to Ahmed as “the man”, I call to confirm we
are talking about the shooting of a 12-year-old boy. “We want to emphasise
that he looked older than he was,” a spokeswoman says.
In Jenin I walked the 130 metres from the place where Ahmed was shot to the
position from which soldiers in a Jeep are said to have targeted him. My
eyesight is not good, yet I could clearly see that Ahmed’s friends, with
whom I had been talking at the spot where he fell, were children.
Trying to make sense of what Ahmed’s death and such reactions to it say about
what is going on in the Arab-Israeli conflict, I visit the grand mufti of
Jerusalem. But instead of a spiritual response, I find myself on the
receiving end of more political diatribe about the current mess in the
Middle East being the fault originally of the British, who with the Balfour
declaration of 1917 supported the formation of a Jewish national home in
British-mandated Palestine.
Finally, I remember the words of another grieving father I had met in
Jerusalem several years before. Rami Elhanan lost his beloved 15-year-old
daughter, Smadar, in a suicide bombing attack nine years ago, and has spent
much of his time since touring Israeli schools talking about the conflict
and the need for it to end. “Sometimes I feel like a boy with his finger in
the dam, talking about peace when the flood of violence and hatred has
already swept away the wall,” he said. “But I believe strongly that the
minute the price of not having peace exceeds the price of peace, then peace
will come. And the loss of a child is the highest price any parent can pay.”
