This was my very first trip to a developing country so I was a little nervous.
To make it worse, it was to one of the most dangerous places in the world: The Gaza Strip. Gaza had only recently been given over to the Palestinians by Israel as part of a new peace deal.
All the Israelis had left Gaza in Palestinian hands. Yasir Arafat and the PLO were in control. And Hamas was on the rise – a terrorist group and an arch rival to the PLO.
After a really long couple of flights, I remember going through customs at Tel Aviv airport in Israel. The customs official asked me for the “purpose of my visit” and I told him I was with a medical mission group that going to Gaza to provide surgery for children.
He crinkled up his nose in disgust and asked, ” Why do you want to do that?”
As he continued to give me a hard time, all of these alarms went off and everyone started running for the exits. He looked at me and yelled, “Bomb! Bomb! get out and get out!”
I grabbed my passport and we all ran for the exits. Thousands of us stood outside for about half an hour while they conducted a search for a bomb. That was my first and last bomb scare.
After we were all allowed back into the airport, the customs official continued to be hostile, obnoxious and suspicious but he eventually let me into the country. Next step was a long bus ride with our entire group down the coast to the Gaza Strip.
For security reasons, we were staying at the United Nations “compound.”
Being familiar with the beautiful UN building in New York City I thought our accommodations would be luxurious. NOT. The” compound” was a rundown, dilapidated old building. We slept in barracks with about 10 cots per room which had bedsheets and an old pillow but no blankets.
The mission coordinator from Operation Smile was just a kid, around 20 years old, that they paid $15,000 a year. He had forgotten to ship the blankets so we were on our own.
It was December and very cold with temperatures in the 20s at night. To make matters worse half the windows were broken or had cracks and there was no heat at all. All of us slept fully dressed with winter coats on. I got up to go to the bathroom at two in the morning only to discover that there were no lights.
I couldn’t believe Operation Smile would run a mission like this and force volunteer surgeons and nurses to stay and accommodations like this. My respect for the organization sank.
After shivering the entire night, my business partner Mike Schell and I each woke up around 5:30 in the morning. While everyone else slept we snuck outside to see what was going on. It sounded like a big commotion in front of the compound.
It was rush hour in Gaza. Hundreds of men were going to work, or going to the mosque, or going somewhere. But we were terrified because all of them were wearing headdresses that made them look like terrorists. It was the same head dress that Yasir Arafat used to wear, it’s called a Keffiyeh.
We had no idea that a Keffiyeh is the cowboy hat of Gaza – and all the men wore one. For years every time we saw that headdress it was on the evening news and connected to some sort of violence or terrorism in the Middle East. We had behind these large bushes some of them could see us watching them. We both began to regret our decision to go on this mission.
About 20 minutes after all the men had passed by, a second wave of “commuters” appeared. Hundreds of children who were going to school. (None of them were wearing headdresses.) To the contrary, all of them were wearing backpacks — just like American kids. It was hard to imagine that terrorists had children – even more shocking, children that loved Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Batman and Spiderman.
They rarely show children of terrorists on the evening news. This brought a smile to our faces and made us reconsider our views of the Gaza Strip. Maybe it wasn’t so dangerous after all.
We went and ate breakfast with the team and hopped on the bus which took us to our partner hospital.
Driving through Gaza City was like traveling through a war zone. You could see bullet holes in the buildings and large craters were bombs had fallen. The city was in shambles. The roads are barely passable for our old school bus and there were few cars.
Most people were walking or riding donkeys or motorcycles. There was a real stench from open sewers, rotting animal carcasses and piles of garbage everywhere you looked. You could tell by people’s clothing and posture that they lived in extreme poverty.
When we arrived at the small hospital where we were going to be providing surgeries, they were hundreds of children and adults crowded around the front entrance. They mobbed us as we left the bus walked into the hospital, pleading with us in Arabic.
We couldn’t understand a word but we certainly knew what they were asking: please help my child? Please, please, please?
The team began unpacking 10,000 pounds medical equipment we had shipped to make the operating rooms as close to American standards as possible and setting up for patient interviews and exams.
Every child needed to be thoroughly examined to see what their medical problem was, what surgery might be appropriate and if they were healthy enough to undergo surgery.
Typically a mission spends the first week screening hundreds of children and choosing the lucky 100 or so children that will receive surgery.
Surgeries happen the second week from dawn to dusk as we scramble to help as many as we can before it is time to head home.
The crowd in front of the hospital is organized to we can start the screening process. This was a Muslim country so all the females lined up on one side and all the males on the other.
Mike and I dove into the crowd with our cameras and started interviewing kids and their moms and dads. Everyone has a different story to tell about why they were there, what the medical problem was, why they needed surgery and how they heard about our mission.
We had a fantastic translator helping us. His name was Suleiman which means ” man of peace.” it is a common Muslim name. I kept calling him Suleiman the Magnificent who used to be the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s.
Many of the children were suffering with clefts such as a cleft lip, a cleft palete or both. Every baby born in America with the club gets surgery automatically within months after being born. But there was virtually no health care system here in Gaza nor had there been for decades. While it was sad that these kids have had to live with their unrepaired clefts, the good news was we had excellent cleft surgeons on the team and they’d all receive surgery and get a great result.
There were many kids who had suffered burns. This is a huge problem in developing countries and especially countries where there is a lot of violence. As part of their protests, the Palestinians love setting tires on fire.
And there were the usual causes of burns that you find in most developing countries such as cheap gas cook stoves that explode, the use of kerosene lamps due to lack of electricity and poor people stealing electricity went their own makeshift wires and connections. Luckily, the same surgeons that were good at clefts were also good at fixing burn scars and contractions.
Finally, there were a lot of kids with problems beyond the scope of what we could handle. Like tumors, cancer, various diseases and syndromes, and orthopedic problems like clubfoot, scoliosis, etc. Sadly, the vast majority of these children were turned away as there was nothing we could do for them.
During our interviews we met a remarkable woman who actually wanted to talk to us. We were shocked because the vast majority of the women wanted nothing to do with men never mind American men with cameras. But this woman had quite a story to tell.
Abeer was horribly burned on her face and her hands. She looked 75 years old but she was only around 27. She just gotten out of Israeli prison where she was sent after she tried to stab an Israeli soldier who shot her little brother to death. She was very well spoken, confident and had a certain charisma about her even though her appearance was so shocking.
“We live like animals here in the Gaza Strip.” She said to us angrily, “ Let me show you. Come with me to Beach Camp and I will show you what it’s like to be a Palestinian in Gaza today.”
Mike and I looked at each other wondering what to do. This sounded a little dangerous but interesting. We asked Suleiman if it was safe and he just shrugged. After mulling it over we decided to take a chance. Without telling anyone, we followed her out of the courtyard, grabbed an old beat-up cab and off we went to Beach Camp.
Beach camp is the third largest refugee camp in the Palestinian territories. It is located on the northern Gaza Strip along the Mediterranean Sea. It was built in 1948 after the Arab-Israeli war for about 23,000 refugees. But today it houses more than 87,000 refugees in really horrible, deplorable conditions.
Abeer started her tour with a visit to her home. In front of her “house” which was really a small hovel, was a giant, hand-drawn color portrait of her little brother and his best friend. They were both Palestinian “martyrs” who were killed by Israeli soldiers. We sat with Abeer’s mother and heard the story of how her son and his friend were killed. They were part of a group of young men throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and lighting tires on fire.
The confrontation escalated when the soldiers tried to arrest some of the young men. One of them ended up shooting Abeer’s little brother in the head. When she saw her brother get shot, Abeer attacked the soldier who killed her brother with a knife. She injured but did not kill him. The soldiers tackled her, took her knife and shoved her face into a burning tire.
She tried to protect her face with her hands so they were horribly burned also. Then they took her into custody and put her in jail. She was tried, found guilty and was sentenced to 5 to 10 years in Israeli prison. We met her just a few months after her release from prison after five years.
Next she took us to the “beach” of Beach Camp. You could tell that it used to be absolutely beautiful. Looking out at the Mediterranean and beautiful beach that stretched far beyond what the eye could see.
But when you turned around and faced the other direction, you saw mountains of garbage and trash. It was unbelievable. The garbage was piled 20, 30, 40 feet high in the air. Another symbol of what a garbage dump Gaza had turned into.
Abeer took us to a pier, or at least the beginning of the pier. There was at the time a blockade of Gaza and Israel controlled everything that went in and out of Gaza. It was illegal to build a pier and to have any boats or ships arrived or depart by water.
Nevertheless, there was this one crazy man who was determined to build a big pier out of old, twisted, abandoned iron and steel he had collected. His dream was to use the Mediterranean to connect Gaza to the world.
We went to the entrance which was a locked steel gate and hollered to see if anyone was there. Five men appeared all with AK-47s slung on the shoulders following their leader, the man with the vision of a pier.
He opened the gate and invited us in and we hesitated because of all the guns but said what the heck. Like Abeer, he had a story to tell, and when he saw our big video camera, he probably thought we were in the media.
He gave us a tour and told us how this pier would be the solution to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Boats and ships from friendly Arab countries could bring much-needed medicine and food.
But as he spoke and we walked around, the pier looked worse and worse. It was all mangled and twisted and built with a rusted steel and iron. One missile from an Israeli jet could sink it.
I asked the man if he was optimistic about the peace plan which had just been approved and if he was happy that all the Israelis had left Gaza.
“Do you think it will work?” I asked naively. “Do you think there will be peace?”
“Of course not!” He bellowed. “We have been killing each other for thousands of years! Another 20 or 30 years of bloodshed is a small price to pay to get rid of all the Jews.”
That of course was not what I had expected. And I wasn’t about to get in an argument with him with all their AK-47s surrounding us. I just kept nodding and Mike kept shooting video. Then the funniest thing happened. There was a call to prayer we could hear over the loudspeakers which are all over Gaza city.
“Follow me!” he said and we did as we ran inside to his office. And we watched him take his shoes off, throw down his prayer mat and start saying his prayers. Mike and I thought it was ironic that minutes after he’s talking about killing all the Jews is on his knees praying to Allah.
The tour with Abeer continued and we stopped at the house of another martyr who had been shot to death that very day. The mother was in mourning, crying in your house surrounded by neighbors, holding a photo of her dead son. We gave her our condolences and left quickly.
Outside we were surrounded by a bunch of Hamas fighters. Young men who were eager to fight Israelis and if needed become martyrs themselves. I tried to interview them as best I could but they were so brainwashed it was a waste of time.
It did make me wonder which of these young men might become a suicide bomber. I was just 32 years old. What would have happened to me if I had been born in Gaza? What choices would I have made?
I had always been fascinated with the question of what makes someone put on a suicide vest and blow themselves up. In America, you watch the news at night and shake your head. You think these people must be crazy or insane. Maybe they have a brain disorder.
But after my trip to Gaza, I don’t know if that’s the case at all. The truth is, no one is born to be a suicide bomber. Normal people can turn into suicide bombers. Suicide bombers are created over time, by certain environments, circumstances, influences and experience.
And Gaza has all of the ingredients you need to breed an entire generation of suicide bombers. In Gaza there is extreme poverty. There is little to no education. There is no industry, no jobs, no opportunity. There is no hope.
There is substantial oppression as Gaza is really one great big refugee camp surrounded by Israel guard posts with machine nests surrounding it and Israel jets overhead. Add a violent ideology and you have the perfect conditions for breeding suicide bombers.
There was one funny moment – if you can believe it – when Mike was changing film for his video camera when I whispered to Suleiman and asked him to please stop telling the Hamas fighters that I was Jewish.
“ I know I’m from New York but I’m not Jewish,” I whispered to Suleiman. “ I’m Irish – not Jewish! ”
And he kept responding to me, loudly, “ Mr. Brian, it’s okay if you are Jewish!”
I was a little worried one of these Hamas fighters might try to make their mark by slashing my throat. But all they really wanted to do was talk. So we let them and then went on our way.
We passed by a soccer field that was filled with people so we stopped to see what was going on. It was some kind of rally and demonstration. There were more than1,000 people there and dozens of them were women holding framed photos of their sons and husbands who had been killed and were martyrs.
In front of the stage, there were a dozen little kids dancing to music coming out over the loudspeakers, surrounded by people watching men and cheering them on. I asked Suleiman who these children wore and he told me they were the sons and daughters of martyrs. So they were especially revered and celebrated.
Right after we arrived a radical Imam started giving a very angry speech. All the children stopped dancing, and the people stopped talking and you could have heard a pin drop. We didn’t need to know Arabic to understand that he was giving an angry rant against America and Israel. We left while it was still safe.
Over the next few days that we were in Gaza Mike and I alternated between interviews with parents and the children at the hospital and touring Gaza city. We visited more refugee camps and met dozens of people who all had interesting stories to tell.
When it was time to leave and go back to New York, the cofounder of Operation Smile begged us to stay because Yassir Arafat was coming to meet everybody. Neither Mike nor I had any interest in meeting Arafat and it was time to leave. We were pushing our luck going to so many crazy places and being around so many AK-47s.
When we left they drove us to the border and we found an Israeli taxi to take us all the way back to Tel Aviv to catch a plane. The taxicab driver asked what we were doing in Gaza. I told him (proudly) that we were part of a medical mission group that provided surgery for around 150 Palestinian children.
The driver shook his head slowly and muttered, “ One big bomb.”
I was a little shocked to hear this – he was just as bad as all the folks in Gaza who wanted to kill everyone in Israel. “ You know, there a lot of children in Gaza.” I said naively.
He just kept shaking his head, “ One bomb is all you need.”
We didn’t talk for the rest of the ride.
It was pretty depressing. The hatred on both sides of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is so deep. It’s been destroying lives for hundreds if not thousands of years.
I came away with little optimism that the current peace deal would change anything and it was only a matter of time before another intifada would arrive.
Like the man said, what’s another 20-30 years of bloodshed?
And he was right.
I went to Gaza 25 years ago and nothing’s changed.
