When Abed reached the hospital in Ramallah, he forced his way through the bedlam of shouting parents, children on stretchers, doctors, nurses, police, photographers, and Palestinian officials. He gave Milad’s name at the reception desk and was told there was no information on his son. Abed began searching in the hospital rooms, where he saw many of Milad’s classmates and their families. He was pleased for the parents who had found their children, although they barely noticed him amid the commotion. He asked everyone whether they had seen Milad. No one had.
Abed returned to the reception desk, saying that he had checked in every room and his son was nowhere to be found. “Your child was on the second bus,” someone called over the din. “That one wasn’t in the accident. It went to a-Ram.” This was the first Abed had heard of a second bus. He called his friend Ziad Barq, whose child was in Milad’s class, asking him to check with his wife, Mufida, the teacher who had helped Abed pay for the trip. Mufida called back right away. “Milad was on the second bus. He’s fine.”
Scarcely able to trust this miraculous news, he left the hospital lobby to stand for a moment in the rain outside. Soon, a parent told him that Milad had actually been transferred from Ramallah to Hadassah in Ein Kerem. With his green ID, Abed couldn’t go there himself, so he called a cousin in Dahiyat a-Salaam who had a blue one. About an hour later, the cousin reported back: a few of the injured children had been admitted, but not Milad. Then Abed got word that the second school bus was on its way back to Anata. He phoned one of his brothers, asking him to go meet it. Several minutes passed and his brother returned the call: “Milad is not here.”
The families were buzzing with news and rumors, which were passed on to Abed throughout the day: Milad is at the military base outside a-Ram; he’s in a hospital in Israel; the army’s letting Nour al-Houda parents with green IDs into Jerusalem. Abed felt as if he were being dunked in barrels of water: first boiling, then freezing. Hot, cold, hot, cold, hot again, cold again. He stayed in Ramallah, by the ER, refusing to answer the reporters who kept pestering him. His younger brother Bashir, who was a video editor at Al Jazeera, came to wait with him together with a nephew. All the while, his phone did not stop ringing, many of the calls from journalists and radio stations. Abed wouldn’t speak to them—he was too anxious. He gave the phone to Bashir, telling him he would talk only to Haifa.
But when Haifa called, she had no news, either. She was waiting at home with Adam and Abed’s four daughters. The eldest, Lulu, now sixteen, had been the first to come home that morning. She was like a mother to Milad, putting him to bed each night. She was often the one to wake him and help him get ready for school. But the day of the trip was a special occasion, and Haifa had dressed and fed the boys herself. So Lulu had left without seeing Milad.
She had been at the Anata girls’ school, around the corner, when her teacher suddenly told all the students to go home, giving no explanation. As Lulu walked out the classroom, she overheard another teacher saying there had been an accident. At her house, she learned that the crash involved the Nour al-Houda kindergartners, but Haifa insisted that Milad was okay. As news came in from neighbors and the television, Lulu grew increasingly agitated and kept asking Haifa to call Abed. People were dropping in—teachers, classmates, other parents—and contradicting each other. Someone claimed she had seen Milad get on the second bus. Someone else said he’d been on the first one. Another maintained that he hadn’t even gone on the trip.
Adam came home from Nour al-Houda not long after Lulu. His class had been dismissed at morning recess. He was thrilled until he saw the teachers crying and heard from a friend that Milad’s bus had been in an accident. He got a ride home with Haifa’s brother-in-law, who drove the boys to and from school each day. Entering the house, Adam realized that he had forgotten his lunch that morning and then saw it sitting on his bed. He ate his ka’ek with falafel, lay down, and fell asleep for the rest of day, as if his brain wanted to protect him from the worry. When he woke up, hours later, he found his four sisters crying, clutching Milad’s clothes and breathing in his scent.
ABED WAS SO tightly wound with fear that he hardly noticed what was happening around him. The Palestinian president and the prime minister had each come to the hospital, along with their large entourages. Abed’s own cousin Abu Jihad walked right past him at the entrance to the ER. Abu Jihad’s brother and brother-in-law both had children who had gone on the trip. The three men had driven to the Jaba road, but by the time they arrived, the fire was out and the students had all been evacuated. The traffic out of there was so bad that they had left their car at the side of the road and set out for Ramallah on foot. At the Qalandia checkpoint, they caught a ride to the hospital.
The staff were overwhelmed, mobbed by parents and family shouting out questions. Abu Jihad heard that some of the dead were at the hospital morgue. Eventually he was directed to a wall affixed with handwritten lists of the names of the children present and their room numbers. He found his nephew and niece on the list, Mohammad Bakr and Zeyna, and ran to their room. When he opened the door, he saw Mohammad Bakr holding Zeyna’s hand.
She was dark with soot from head to toe. Her skull was fractured and her hand was broken. Mohammad Bakr said he had been sitting at the front of the bus when it crashed, but he immmediately moved toward the back and found Zeyna trapped under a piece of metal. He helped pull her out from under it. Abu Jihad ran to the lobby to get his brother—Zeyna’s father—who was slumped on the floor, sure he had lost his daughter.
Abu Jihad was back at Zeyna’s bedside when Abu Mazen, the Palestinian president, came into the room, followed by camera crews and photographers. At seventy-six, he had a grandfatherly bearing and a full head of white hair. He stopped to talk to every kindergartner, exchanging a few words. As he left each child’s bed, the cameras would linger on an aide handing over a toy in a large shopping bag. Some of the children got home to discover that their gift, a PlayStation, was broken.
At Zeyna’s bed, Abu Mazen turned to Abu Jihad. “How are things in Anata?” Abu Jihad was perhaps the only Salama who had even less respect for the PA than Abed did. A local leader of Islamic Jihad, he saw the PA as a source of persecution. “All of Anata is zift,” he told Abu Mazen, using a word for asphalt that also meant crap. “Except for the streets, since none of them are paved.” Abu Mazen laughed. Abu Jihad then complained about the complete lack of services in the town—not even a bank or a clinic. “No one cares about us,” he said. Abu Mazen promised he would take care of it, then left for a photo op near the hospital entrance, where he donated blood.
BY LATE AFTERNOON, most of the parents had located their children. Only Abed and a handful of others had not. Abed did not know that six bodies were at the hospital, lying in the room next to him. One was the teacher, Ula Joulani. The other five were children. Three were too badly burned for identification. The remaining two, a girl and a boy, were not. Although he felt useless at the hospital and wanted to search for his son in a-Ram and Anata, Abed had a strong feeling that Milad was nearby. Something told him not to leave.
The parents who had reunited with their children began to depart, which is when Abed learned from the hospital staff about the bodies in the adjacent room. He desperately wanted to go inside. His nephew urged him not to. A doctor came out of the ER, looking for parents to identify the two recognizable bodies. He asked Abed for the color of his son’s hair. “Blond,” Abed replied. “You need to stay here,” the doctor said. “This boy has black hair.” The doctor turned to a father standing beside Abed. His son had dark hair, and he was permitted to enter. He came out screaming and hitting himself in the head.
In that moment, Abed confronted the very real possibility that Milad’s body was in the room, burned beyond recognition. Another doctor came to take blood from Abed to test for DNA and told him to call his wife and son to also give blood samples. Abed phoned Haifa, who left with Adam right away. Waiting for them beneath the fluorescent lights of the hospital hallway, Abed cried and prayed on the linoleum floor.
Abed hadn’t told Haifa and Adam why they were needed at the hospital. Haifa walked in with a look of shock on her face. Adam seemed utterly bewildered. Abed thought how young and helpless his nine-year-old son appeared—too young to be witnessing this scene. They all joined the doctor in a room off the hallway where Abed had been praying. Adam was crying, and the doctor asked if it was because of the needle. Adam shook his head.
Once the DNA tests were over there was nothing to do but wait. Bashir drove them home. The house was full of women—family, neighbors, and friends. Haifa barely spoke. Bashir’s wife, Ruba al-Najjar, noticed that Haifa wasn’t crying and offered her a cigarette. Ruba told her that she should do whatever she wanted. If she felt like crying, she should cry. If she didn’t, that was fine, too. Haifa said that she was okay.
Ruba knew that kind of silence. When she was sixteen, her brother had been severely beaten under interrogation and was temporarily paralyzed. As soon as she heard the news, Ruba went out to stab a soldier. In the Old City, she injured a border guard near one of the gates to al-Aqsa. She was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison, which is where she was when her father died in an accident. Ruba was taken out of prison by the guards for a visit home. Although no one told her the reason for the visit, she knew it could only be that someone in her family had died.
After, on the return journey, she held on to a photograph of her father. The soldiers began to sing in Hebrew, “I love my faa-ther! I love my faa-ther!” They sang the same line over and over, loudly, joyously. Ruba determined to do whatever it took not to let them see her cry. I am a stone, she told herself. When she got back to the prison, she had lost the ability to speak. Women in the jail tried to help by pinching and scratching her, forcing her to yell. After a few days of silence and a strong twist on her ear, she yelped in pain and began to sob. She could speak again.
Smoking a cigarette beside Haifa, Ruba realized that it had been nearly twenty years since she went mute. She still cried when she talked about the cruelty of the soldiers and the force of will she had summoned to hide her pain. Ruba didn’t want Haifa to lose her ability to speak too.
ABED HAD JOINED some men at the Anata Youth Club up the hill, sitting with them until around midnight. When he returned to the house, the living room was still filled with women, talking softly and listening to a radio recitation of the Quran. Although he knew that Milad coming home became less likely with every passing minute, Abed still held out hope that his son might be alive. There were more parents missing children than there were bodies in that room; some mothers and fathers had only just located their children, fifteen hours after the accident. Perhaps Milad was at the Israeli military base, after all. Perhaps he was at a different hospital. Maybe one of the people who had taken the children in their cars had brought Milad to their home in a-Ram or Jerusalem, where their family was now feeding him and trying to find his parents.
Abed went to the bedroom, where Haifa was sitting on the bed talking to her sister. Normally, Milad would be sleeping there between his parents. At the sight of the empty bed, Abed broke down. He entered the bathroom, shut the door, and wept loudly. It was the first moment he’d had alone since hearing the news that morning. Haifa heard him crying and came to the bathroom. She held Abed’s heaving body, comforting him. Sobbing in her arms, Abed thought it should be the other way around—he should be comforting Haifa. But she hadn’t shed a single tear.