Nearly twenty minutes had passed since Huda and her staff had come upon the burning bus. Flames and smoke were still pouring from the smashed windows. Huda’s driver, Abu Faraj, was directing traffic, keeping an open path for the evacuees and telling drivers of oncoming cars to turn back. The crowd had grown so large that Huda could no longer see the driver and the teacher she and Salem had pulled from the front of the bus.
She was focused on the children, gently carrying them with one of the UN nurses to the cars that had stopped at the accident site. Many of the drivers had volunteered to transport the burn victims and stood ready to race to the nearest accessible hospital, which, for most of them, was in Ramallah. The hospitals in Jerusalem were far better, but only those with blue IDs could reach them. A few of the drivers did have blue IDs, and some took off in the direction of Hadassah Hospital at Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. The majority, those with green IDs, went in the opposite direction, along the flooded road to Ramallah.
Nearly all the children had been brought off the bus when Salem, who had by now gone in and out of the flames several times, saw that Ula, the teacher and his partner in the rescue, was trapped beneath a front seat and her leg was burning. But by the time he got to her it was too late, she was gone. He carried Ula from the bus and placed her on the ground. Her nephew Saadi watched in the rain while a man covered her with his coat.
In all of this, Salem had felt nothing, not even as someone in the crowd grabbed at his arm and pinched him. One of Huda’s nurses yelled to him that his jacket was on fire; he shouted back that it was not. The nurse put it out as he went to climb back into the bus. The few children still inside were no longer alive. The last boy Salem pulled out was facing down, crouched behind the frame of a seat. He was still wearing a backpack, which Salem held to pick the boy up.
Stepping out of the bus for the final time, Salem broke out weeping, shouting that he should have saved more. Somehow, not a hair on his head was burned. Abu Faraj stood unmoving, in shock, as if mesmerized by the flames. Huda turned to the nurse beside her and saw that her face was black and streaked by rain. She realized she must look the same.
They were soaked and bone weary and there was nothing more for them to do. When a Palestinian ambulance finally arrived, most of the injured children had already been evacuated. Huda didn’t even notice it. The bus was still crackling with flames and there was much shouting and commotion. Not a single firefighter, police officer, or soldier had come.
Huda wanted to follow the children. She found her team, and they returned to the UNRWA van. Nidaa, the pregnant pharmacist, was still inside, inconsolable. Abu Faraj started dropping off everyone at home, as Huda called around and confirmed that most of the children were in Ramallah. Then she phoned her UNRWA supervisor. He didn’t understand the magnitude of the accident and demanded that the team turn around and go to Khan al-Ahmar or he would cut their pay. Huda refused and said he should cut just her salary, no one else’s.
After stopping for a quick shower, Huda set off for the hospital, taking the clinic’s social worker with her. When they got there, word spread that Huda had been at the crash. A great many parents and other relatives sought her out, asking whether she had seen a boy with a Spider-Man backpack, a girl with her hair in yellow ribbons. Huda told them all the same thing: the children had been covered in soot and she couldn’t tell what they were wearing.
Going from room to room, Huda checked on the injured children, soothing them. Since leaving the bus she had felt something nagging at her. She was sure the kindergartners had been silent, at least early in their ordeal. Now, at the bed of one girl, Huda asked her why that was, why she had heard no sound. “We were so scared,” the girl said. “When we saw the flames, we thought we had died. We thought we were in hell.”