I first visited Shifa, the largest of Gaza’s six public hospitals, in September 2012. I was doing a story about the deep poverty gripping the 139-square-mile Palestinian coastal enclave after a United Nations report suggested that it might not be a “livable place” by 2020.
An 18-year-old “who could not find work beyond peddling potato chips,” as I wrote then in The New York Times, had recently self-immolated on the hospital lawn. Inside Shifa, I saw intubation kits a year beyond their expiration date and empty supply cabinets: They were short of antibiotics, anticoagulants, even plastic gloves and baby formula. There were 750 beds, and 2,000 sick people a day.
“The only thing available enough here is patients,” a surgeon told me.
And that was between wars.
Two months later I was back at Shifa, this time with the sounds of Israeli drones and Hamas rocket fire nearby. We reporters seemed to end up at the hospital nearly every afternoon during the eight-day war that Israel dubbed Operation Pillar of Defense. To follow the victims of a particular airstrike. To talk to those taking refuge on the grounds because their neighborhoods were bombed out. To attend news conferences by the Hamas leaders who run Gaza.
Yes, the rumors of Hamas storing weapons and operating command centers underneath the sprawling hospital complex were rampant back then, too, though Israeli soldiers were not on the ground in Gaza during the 2012 war to try to prove it.
Yes, we saw Hamas militants with their trademark green scarves and headbands and even some commanders hovering in the hospital, lending credence to Israel’s accusation that the group exploited its patients and employees as human shields, a war crime.
And yes, the doctors and nurses I met at Shifa were dedicated public servants heroically trying to do their jobs in dire circumstances.
Did they resent or even despise Israel, for its relentless attacks and ongoing restrictions on travel and trade into Gaza? Yes. Did they want to wipe it off the map? Perhaps. Did they yearn to murder Jews like me? No.
Nor did they, or their patients, revere Hamas.
“We are not Hamas, and we are not with the others,” said a 34-year-old woman camped on Shifa’s lawn with her 6-month-old in a car seat. “We just want to live in our homes.”
One day we toured Shifa’s wards with Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, and his Egyptian counterpart, Hesham Qandil. Haniyeh held the body of a baby slain in the war, and talked to the father of a 2-year-old whose skull had been fractured by debris from shelling near the border. “What was his fault? What was his guilt?” the man cried.
Another afternoon at the hospital, a large screen flashed images of the wounded as a boy hawked coffee and tea from a kettle and thermos, a shekel a cup, to the crowd awaiting a delegation of Arab foreign ministers. As I took notes on the surreal scene, a makeshift market outside an overcrowded hospital during a war, the fleeting calm was shattered, first by the sound of militants nearby firing a rocket toward Jerusalem, and then by a series of explosions in the distance — Israel’s telltale response
Next: Sirens. Six ambulances streamed into Shifa’s circular driveway, unloading the bodies of men the Hamas officials on hand identified as fighters, at least two of them without heads. Then three more, carrying dead and wounded kids.
“There’s a real massacre now,” said the Hamas spokesman who had been awaiting the diplomats. The Gaza health ministry, run by Hamas, at that point put the Palestinian death toll at 130. It would be more than 10 times that by the war’s end, according to after-action reports by independent human rights groups and the U.N. That seemed staggering at the time, and now feels like something of a skirmish.
The crowd at Shifa that day chanted, “Revenge, revenge, Qassam Brigades, get revenge for us,” referring to Hamas’s military wing. None of us there — not the chanters, not the visiting diplomats, not we journalists — ever imagined the scope, scale or barbarism of the revenge to come for Israel nearly 11 years later, on Oct. 7, 2023.
