Hadassah Ein Kerem was the largest hospital in Jerusalem with a specialized burn unit. Livnat Wieder usually led a team of social workers in the adult oncology department, but that morning she had been called in to help with an influx of Palestinian families, most of them from East Jerusalem. She felt ill-equipped—many of them spoke no Hebrew, and she had no Arabic. She was also unused to dealing with trauma or children. Her work with cancer patients and their relatives was entirely different: long-term palliative care in which she formed close bonds with the families.
Before any victims of the crash were brought to the ER, the hospital activated its protocol for mass casualty events, which had been developed during the Second Intifada. It set up three centers: one for information, fielding calls from relatives and the media; a second for triage; and a third for family support, staffed by social workers. Hundreds of calls came in to the information center, many of them from parents with green IDs seeking permission to enter Jerusalem before the army had opened up the checkpoints to them. Hadassah staff contacted Dalia Basa in the Civil Administration, who dealt with Palestinian patients, and asked her to help with transportation and permits. Livnat was seconded to the family center, where the staff arranged tables and chairs with tea and cookies and coffee and water. All the relatives were directed to gather there. Normally each family would be assigned a social worker, but with hundreds of relatives streaming in, Livnat and the staff were swamped.
The family center had only three Arabic-speaking staffers—Huda Ibrahim was one of them. A ’48 Palestinian social worker from Abu Ghosh, west of Jerusalem, she was unmarried and worked with children in hemato-oncology. Livnat adored her. She thought Huda was the best social worker in all of Israel. Huda displayed a depth of empathy that simply could not be taught. Livnat had trained dozens of social workers and concluded that the core skills were innate: students either had them or they didn’t. But even the best of them weren’t like Huda. She knew how to be genuinely present with patients while also anticipating their every need.
Livnat, who lived in the settlement of Elazar, founded by American Jews, covered her hair with a beret in the modern orthodox style. She admired the way Huda wore her headscarf, which reminded her of her own community. The social work staff called Huda by a Hebraized version of her name: Yehudit Avraham. They saw it as a compliment, an induction.
Livnat worked with another ’48 Palestinian, Khalil Khoury, a veteran nurse from Haifa. To him, the hospital felt like one of the only places in Israel where Palestinian citizens seemed somewhat equal to their Jewish coworkers. Although there was plenty of racism in the hospital—Hadassah segregated Arab and Jewish maternity patients at the request of Jewish mothers—Khalil felt well treated by his colleagues. After a patient once told him to go back to Gaza, his Jewish supervisor said the woman was free to go elsewhere. When Ariel Sharon had a stroke in 2005, Khalil helped care for the prime minister and wrote about it in the American Journal of Nursing, though he noted that “the presence of Arabs on the [prime minister’s] treatment team was considered exceptional.” As a ’48 Palestinian, Khalil suffered abuse from both sides. PA officials allowed to enter Israel criticized him for paying taxes to the state and working for a Zionist institution. “My parents stayed on the land and you left,” Khalil would reply. “And now you’re coming here for treatment!”
Khalil and Huda worked with Livnat to compile a list of the missing children. The one that the school provided seemed to be inaccurate. With Khalil and Huda translating, Livnat made her way around the room collecting information—names, identifying features, clothing, photographs—and entering it into a national hospital database. She could use it to check whether the missing children had been registered elsewhere. But nearly all of the victims were in Ramallah, which wasn’t linked to the database.
There was pandemonium in the lobby and it spilled into the family center. In most mass casualty events, families would go to the victims’ rooms. But there were hardly any victims to go to, just hundreds of relatives, all of them crowded into two small spaces. Livnat saw many more men waiting there than women. She learned that among the families from the West Bank, the men were more likely to have work permits that allowed them to enter Jerusalem. Thinking of her own six children, the youngest close in age to the kindergartners, Livnat suddenly felt for the mothers who were prevented from searching for their little ones.
LATER IN THE day, Livnat was charged with identifying three children who had been transferred from Hadassah Mount Scopus. The first, a boy named Fadl, had been scorched on his ear and one side of his face; he was soon reunited with his parents. Fadl was in much better shape than the other two: Tala Bahri, whom Eldad Benshtein had brought in his ambulance, and a second boy, still alive but too badly burned to identify.
Livnat couldn’t match him to a name or a family. Hours passed and no one came to claim him. Then, toward the end of her shift, two mothers showed up at the hospital looking for their sons. Each had heard there was a boy there who might be hers. At that hour, there were very few children not accounted for. Both women knew that if this boy was not hers, then her own son was most likely dead. It reminded Livnat of the biblical story of the judgment of Solomon, when two mothers came to the king, claiming that the same infant was theirs and that a dead baby belonged to the other woman.
Haya al-Hindi was the first to reach the hospital. Her son Abdullah was one of Tala Bahri’s best friends. They sat together in class and always chose one another as partners for school activities. The Hindis lived near the Bahris on the main street of Shuafat Camp, so Tala and Abdullah often rode together on the bus. Haya had spent her whole life in Shuafat Camp; her family had been expelled from Jimzu, a village near Ramle, in 1948. She and her husband, Hafez, lived on the sixth floor of an UNRWA building in the center of the camp. Both had blue IDs. Hafez crossed the checkpoint each morning to work at a pharmacy at a West Jerusalem hospital, Shaare Zedek.
That morning, Haya had prepared her two sons, Abdullah and Ahmad, for the trip. When it was time to leave, Abdullah stayed on the couch, staring at her. She was unnerved by his look. Downstairs, the boys ran into an older cousin, who offered to walk them to the bus in the rain. They left at 7:30 A.M. A little over an hour later, while having breakfast, Haya had to stop eating. She was gripped by a sense of foreboding. Soon after, her phone started buzzing—it was Hafez, wanting to know whether the boys had gone on the trip. Haya dialed Abdullah’s teacher, Ula Joulani, but she didn’t answer. Haya called her several more times. Then she heard about the accident. She put on an abaya and ran out to the Shuafat checkpoint.
The ride to Ramallah Hospital, eight and a half miles away, took nearly two hours because the traffic was so bad and there were two checkpoints on the way. A man holding a list of names told her that both Ahmad and Abdullah were there. She went searching from room to room, not yet aware of the severity of the accident, not knowing that the bus had flipped and burned. Finally she found Ahmad, sitting naked on a bed. It was cold in the hospital and still raining outside. She looked for a sheet to cover him but couldn’t find one. “Why is he naked?” she shouted when she saw a doctor. “Because the children were all burned,” he said.
Ahmad’s back was bruised but otherwise he was unharmed. He said a man had thrown him out of one of the bus windows. Ahmad recalled that Abdullah wanted them to sit together behind the driver. But Ahmad didn’t want to and moved down toward the back. Right after crossing the checkpoint, he said, there had been an earthquake and the bus turned over. All the children and teachers were thrown into a pile. Then there was a fire and little gray bits began to fall on them. Some of the children thought the flakes were snow. A man came into the bus and started lifting the children. Once Ahmad was out of the bus, he didn’t see Abdullah again.
Haya searched the rest of the rooms but didn’t find Abdullah. A little later, she heard from Hafez’s brothers that there was a boy at Hadassah Ein Kerem who might be Abdullah. They all left Ramallah together and got stuck in standstill traffic at the Qalandia checkpoint, arriving at Ein Kerem long after Hafez. When she got out of the car, she saw what looked like several hundred members of the Hindi clan. They were one of the biggest families in Shuafat Camp.
She was taken to a room where Huda Ibrahim was waiting. Huda explained that a boy had come in; he was in bad shape and Haya would need to give a sample of DNA. A nurse swabbed her mouth. A policewoman then brought her the boy’s clothes, some of them badly burned. They were not her son’s clothes, Haya said. The policewoman asked her to look again. Haya repeated that she was certain these clothes did not belong to Abdullah. The policewoman insisted: other people had said these were Abdullah’s clothes. “You’re in shock,” she told her.
Haya grew angry. She was being gaslit. Huda stepped in to calm her. “Okay, the boy in the next room isn’t yours. You need to go look for your son.” The family waited for the DNA results to come back, just to be sure. But then Hafez’s brothers were allowed to see the burned boy to confirm that he wasn’t Abdullah. They came out crying, but this boy had a mole on his neck. Abdullah was still missing. It was now evening.
NANSY QAWASME AND her mother were called in to see Livnat and Huda, who explained about the boy who had not yet been identified. They asked Nansy for a sample of DNA and to look at the boy’s clothes. Most of them had melted into a hard, blackened block, but the edge of a jacket was still discernible. It was Salaah’s. Then she saw the teddy bear boxers, which were somehow still whole. Nansy knew now that Salaah was burned, though she had no sense of the extent of it.
Nansy and her mother left the room to wait for the DNA results, and sat near another mother. It was Haya. As Nansy wept, Haya tried to offer comfort. “I found one of my sons,” she said. “I’ll find the other one and you’ll find yours.” Sobbing, Nansy said she had just seen her boy’s clothes.
A nurse told Nansy and her family that they were allowed to enter the boy’s room. Azzam went first. Nansy’s mother watched his face closely as he came out, but he showed no emotion. Azzam’s father had been with him and also seemed to have no reaction. Nansy’s mother was hopeful: maybe Salaah wasn’t in such bad shape. Osama was called in next—and quickly brought out, crying and shouting. As he left the room, he threw up and then fainted. When he came to, he lifted a chair and slammed it against the door and the windows. The staff thought he must be the father. Osama knelt at their mother’s feet, weeping and kissing her hands. “Inshallah khair, inshallah khair.” God willing, it’ll be okay. After Nansy’s brother Faisal went in, he slammed his fist against the door and broke his hand.
Faisal and Osama begged their mother not to let Nansy go in. “You’ll lose your daughter,” Osama said. One of the social workers took Nansy’s mother aside, telling her there was little left of Salaah. If not for the mole, they wouldn’t have been able to identify him. Still, Nansy wanted to see Salaah.
She should wait until after he’d had surgery, the family said, when he’d have new skin. There was a long struggle ahead. She should go home, rest. As they got up to leave the hospital, Nansy saw a doctor who had come out of Salaah’s room. She stopped to ask how he was doing. The doctor pointed to the sky: now it is with God.
HAYA LEFT EIN Kerem after 10:00 P.M. There was no point in staying any longer. All the boys there had been accounted for, though Tala Bahri still hadn’t been claimed. Tala’s father had started his search in the morning, driving from Shuafat Camp to the standstill traffic at the Hizma checkpoint, where he abandoned the car and ran to the accident site. While his sister looked in Ramallah, he caught a ride to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, then made his way to Ein Kerem. Hours after nightfall, he identified Tala’s yellow jacket in an image posted at the family center.
Although there was no news, Haya decided to return to Ramallah Hospital together with Hafez and her family. On the drive there it started to dawn on her that Abdullah must be dead. More than thirteen hours had passed since the accident. Different family members had checked at all the hospitals in Jerusalem. As far as she knew, the only children who had not yet been identified were in the Ramallah morgue. When they got to the hospital, she went directly to the morgue and asked the guard to let her inside. “What do you want to see?” the guard asked. “Charcoal?”
Haya passed out. She woke up in a bed with an IV in her arm and blood dripping from the catheter in her vein. She cursed the hospital, the guard, and the useless staff. She felt a heavy pain in her head, as if her body were absorbing news that her mind refused to accept. The nurses sat her in a wheelchair, and Hafez pushed her down the corridor to visit Ahmad, who was being kept overnight. Before they got to his room, she put her hands on top of her throbbing head and wailed. Hafez should take her home, Haya’s mother said. There were plenty of other people to spend the night there with Ahmad.
Haya and Hafez got back to their apartment well after midnight. It was packed with neighbors and family. They checked with the hospital, but the DNA results still weren’t in. Haya stayed up all night, watching out the window. There were rumors that some of the children had been taken in by Bedouin in Jaba; maybe a Jaba family would appear in the street below with Abdullah. Before sunrise, Haya did the morning prayer, then changed her clothes and prayed twice more. One of Hafez’s brothers came into the kitchen and found her sobbing on the floor. To calm her, he said Abdullah was alive, they had found him. She began to cry even harder. A moment later, the loudspeaker at the mosque announced that Abdullah al-Hindi was dead.