‘Text me you haven’t died’ — My sister was 42,010th person murdered in Gaza

Dr. Soma Baroud was murdered by Israeli forces on Oct. 9 when the taxi she and other doctors were riding in was destroyed by a U.S.-supplied bomb.

Ramzy Baroud is a U.S.-Palestinian journalist and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. His articles regularly appear in People’s World. His sister, Dr. Soma Baroud, still lived in Palestine, providing health services for besieged Gazans. After her husband was killed by Israel earlier this year, on Oct. 9 it was her turn. The taxi that she and other doctors were riding in was blown up by a U.S.-supplied Israeli bomb. In the first article below, Ramzy Baroud shares her last words of resilience and love in the face of unimaginable loss. The second article is by Dr. Soma Baroud herself, written in September after Israel destroyed her family’s home.

“Your lives will continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children, who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”

These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.

Dr. Soma Baroud was murdered on Oct. 9 when Israeli warplanes bombed a taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

I am still unable to understand whether she was on her way to the hospital, where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?

The news of her murder—or, more accurately, assassination, as Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors—arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page.

“Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area…” the post read.

It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, and the 42,010th on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.

I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis strike.

I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.

I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity. “Every morning,” I said, “Just type: ‘We are fine.’” That’s all I asked of her.

But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, though never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Koranic verse, to one of her favorite novels, and so on.

“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude,” she said on more than one occasion before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes … totally … I agree … one hundred percent.”

For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.

I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.

The firstborn and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us.

She was just a child when my eldest brother Anwar, still a toddler, died in a UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that, with time, turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a U.S.-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.

Two years after the death of the first Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar so that the legacy of the first boy may carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.

My father began his life as a child laborer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again, a laborer; that’s because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the war of 1967, known as the Naksa.

A clever, principled man and a self-taught intellectual, my dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way.

When he decided to become a merchant, buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Though her skin healed, cuts on her fingers, due to individually wrapping thousands of razors, remained a testament to the difficult life she lived.

“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, ultimately five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.

Years later, my parents would send her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, though never her own.

She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital and at Nasser Hospital, among other medical centers. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, opening a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor and did all she could to heal those victimized by war.

Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza that truly changed the face of medicine, collectively putting great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality, but also the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.

When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the war, she told me that “when Aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women—doctors, nurses, and other medical staff—would surround her in total adoration.”

At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis with a small olive orchard and a few palm trees; a loving husband, himself a professor of law, and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.

Life, even under siege, at least for Soma and her family, seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end.

True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, thus her love affair with and constant citation from García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or went missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories, and hope. That was before the latest war.

“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January when the news circulated that her husband was executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis.

But since the body remained missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and to give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.

To maximize their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza.

This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, traveling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages, and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion and every massacre.

“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”

These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month.

“My heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble,” she wrote.

“This is not a story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I wrote or spoke. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family,” she continued.

A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbors in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.

There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble: an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate.

My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war was over, I would do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt or Turkey, and that we will shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “Let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.

Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded with her.

Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance, I thought maybe my sister was indeed gone.

Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women, and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.

Then, another bag, with the name “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” written across the thick white plastic. Her colleagues carried her body and gently laid it on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to verify her identity. I looked the other way.

I refuse to see her but in the way that she wanted to be seen: a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness, and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”

But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is OK?

My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.

No more messages from her.

___

My Heart is Broken
By Dr. Soma Baroud
Sept. 1, 2024

After losing my home, I felt broken. Humiliated. I have never experienced this feeling before.

For months we waited for the Israelis to leave Khan Yunis, so that we could sprint back home. But now, there is no home to run back to. Our mornings, which used to be filled with the potential of good news, are now empty. Our loss is complete.

My son never wanted to leave the house in the first place. He felt rooted there. His bond with the place was different from the rest. He cared for the trees daily, counting the days to olive harvest and the date season. He planted mint and basil. He protected everything he planted from the elements.

When the war started, he did everything he could so that we didn’t feel compelled to leave the house and abandon the goats, the chickens, and the trees. He even managed to generate some electricity using solar panels and fetched fresh water from a nearby mosque.

But when the Israeli army took over Khan Yunis, we had no other option but to leave. We returned to the house every time we had a chance, only to see it deteriorate, day after day: Shells exploded in the backyard; olive branches shattered; dead chickens and goats; broken windows and doors.

Every time we returned home, I would fall into a deep depression. But then the children would remind me that all could be restored, as long as the house itself remained standing.

The last time we returned, it was in its worst shape yet. The doors were gone, the windows fully shattered or broken, and even the balconies had collapsed under the weight of the bombs. Our kitchen was destroyed, even our clothes were removed from the closets and torn to pieces. I couldn’t sleep, but the kids kept reminding me to remain grateful, that our loss was not as bad as others, that there was still hope.

But now…what can I say? Oh, my heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble.

This is not a story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I wrote or spoke. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family.

Here we celebrated birthdays and holidays, broke our fasts in Ramadan, and entertained friends. This was the same place from which our kids completed their studies, excelled in universities, and from which some of them left after celebrating their weddings. Some of them have succeeded in their lives, and others are still trying, but it all started from here, from this heap of rubble and broken dreams.

I know that life does not always go the way we plan or hope. But after all of this, this horrific war, all I had hoped for was to simply go home, and sleep. I mean truly sleep as I haven’t slept for nearly a year.

I had kept everything that reminded me of the kids as they grew up. Scraps of old papers with their handwriting as children, old drawings, and even gift wrapping from past birthdays. It was all kept there, classified, categorized, cherished.

The very details of the life of my husband, who was martyred or remains missing, only God knows, were all there. I wanted to keep everything exactly where he left it before the war.

I told the children that no matter what happens, don’t remove anything that reminds me of your father. Keep them exactly the way he placed them before he was gone.

Now, everything else is gone as well.

I want to stop. I don’t know how.

Oh, how my heart is broken…

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CONTRIBUTOR

Ramzy Baroud

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about Palestine, the Middle East, and global issues for over 20 years. He is an internationally syndicated columnist, an editor, an author of several books, and the founder of The Palestine Chronicle. His books include 'The Second Palestinian Intifada', 'My Father Was a Freedom Fighter' and 'The Last Earth.' His latest book is 'These Chains Will Be Broken'. Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter. He is currently a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University.