In Gaza: ‘We Have Had Enough’

Dr. Rynearson. a longtime consultant to the Dart Center, has traveled frequently to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, working with mental health professionals there. He gave us this report after his most recent visit.


JABALIYA, GAZA—With the late morning sun at our backs we hiked to a ridge top overlooking the field. In the welcomed coolness of a light breeze and the pungency of the freshly worked soil from the valley floor, we looked down the rows of green strawberry plants and vegetables stretching below us. Descending and then ascending toward the next ridgeline a half-mile from where we stood, the gentle symmetry of the rows abruptly ended at the base of the next ridge that bordered an Israeli settlement.

Because the settlement was beyond the ridge, all we could see was its foreboding perimeter—a “no man’s” land of plowed field, a brown smear across its face, a high fenced barrier across its spine and a guarded observation tower at its highest point.

The Palestinian family who farmed this field—mother, father and fourteen children—lived in a tiny cinderblock house at the outskirts of Jabaliya, a city in North Gaza. When there was no answer at their door we walked to the field where Ibrahim knew they would be working.

Ibrahim, a Palestinian psychologist from the Gaza Community Mental Health Center, was counseling the family with weekly visits and had prepared them for my appearance—an American psychiatrist visiting the mental health center as a volunteer trainer to develop programs of support for family members after violent death. He and the family wanted my consultation in easing their bereavement.

The father greeted us and then left to gather family members from the field at a work shed where they ate and rested. Two daughters brought chairs, insisted that we sit and returned with trays—one with glasses of hot Turkish coffee and another with freshly washed strawberries. The mother appeared with her five-year-old son who helped steady her. She sat on a rug her husband spread at the base of a tree and leaned back against the trunk explaining to Ibrahim that she was still fatigued and unable to work the fields since the deaths of her children six weeks before.

The night of their deaths, Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli settlement with rockets and mortar from the far edge of the family’s strawberry field. Within minutes an Israeli tank drove to the base of the observation tower and opened fire with rockets, cannon and machine gun straight across the field and into the village. The Palestinian terrorists escaped, but five of the family’s children were killed when a rocket fired from the tank made a direct hit on the wall beside their house where they huddled for protection.

The mother needed to talk, and needed to talk to me. Her eyes were fixed on mine through the compulsive retelling, interrupted only by Ibrahim’s translation. It was crucial that she reenact the dying of her children in vivid detail and that I witness a recounting of that drama not only through her words, but visually witness the space where this had happened, where she pointed—the edge of the field, the base of the tower where the tank was parked, even struggling to her feet to point to the wall where the children had been killed.

The father insisted that Ibrahim and I examine rocket fragments gathered from the death site.

This had really happened and I needed to bear witness.

Four of the children had died immediately. They buried two of the children, but two were so disintegrated that there was nothing left to bury. Weeks after the deaths, they were still finding body parts of children scattered across the field.

The fifth child, badly disfigured and burned, was transferred to a trauma hospital in Israel where he died three weeks later. The Israelis would not allow her to visit him and now she waited for his body to be returned to Jabaliya so he could be buried beside his two brothers.

Ibrahim interrupted to ask how the family was adjusting.

The father said that they were beginning to cry because they were accepting the finality of the deaths, “..that they are gone forever.”

One of the daughters said they were having recurring nightmares of the attack, and the five-year-old son was wetting his bed and refused to separate from his parents, “... but he’s getting better.”

I asked to see pictures of the children when they were alive. The photographs passed between us and included a large poster produced by the local newspaper showing the smiling faces of the five children with their names and confirmation of their martyrdom.

As Ibrahim and I rose to say goodbye the mother insisted we stay for a moment. She had something else to tell me. She spoke at some length, again staring intently at me, but this time with feeling, her eyes brimming with tears. As she finished they streamed down her face.

“She wants you to know that she does not want revenge for what happened ...

“She wants the killing to stop ...

“She says that all of us are farmers, not soldiers. The Israeli people are not soldiers either ...

“Our terrorists and their soldiers are the ones who are fighting, but it is the leaders who won’t stop it. Arafat, Sharon and your President Bush are the men who continue this killing ...

“We have had enough. We need this to stop ...

“She hopes that Abbas and Sharon and Bush will make peace.

“She wants the deaths of her five children to be the last deaths in this awful war ... ”

Ibrahim and I talked as we walked back to the car. We remarked on the resilience and courage of the family and each of us was awed by the mother’s healing message. He reminded me that Palestinians have a long tradition of dealing with wars, despotic leaders and violent death. But despite the thousands of years of trauma and grief that reverberated over these hills and fields, like other Palestinians this family stubbornly remained.

The mother’s message went beyond that shared capacity for stoicism and solitary persistence, and beyond the all too familiar demands for retaliation and retribution. It was her admission of vulnerability that allowed her to empathize with the suffering of every family, Palestinian and Israeli. She wanted my witnessing to serve an enlivening connection through and beyond her tragedy—that the deaths of her children might promise the beginning of a peaceful reconciliation with Israeli families who were also suffering—to stop the killing.