I'll refer to him as Fauzi. I will not disclose his real name for obvious reasons. Like many Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, he made a living working in Israel, and many years ago he worked on construction for our home renovation. One day, during a Jewish holiday, I was in my bedroom when I heard a blood-curdling scream from the room of Nimrod, my son.
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I ran there as quickly as possible, and when I arrived, I saw Nimrod unconscious, bleeding unimaginably. Fauzi leaning over him - may God forgive me a thousand sins for what went through my mind - until my eyes realized that he was tightly tying a towel around the main artery of the boy's right hand.
Fauzi screamed the word car at me. Silvan Shalom, my husband, joined him shouting, and I ran barefoot to the driveway. During the drive to the hospital, Nimrod remained in Fauzi's arms, and he was trying to keep him awake as he simultaneously pressed the towel on the bleeding hand.
While I was driving, he was shaking - we were shaking too - and Fawzi told us that Nimrod tried to open a broken window in the house that was about to get replaced during the renovation, and the glass tore his artery.
For seven frantic hours, the three of us – Silvan , Fauzi, and I – sat in the waiting room outside the operating room in Ichilov Hospital. Fauzi didn't move from us. In the end, the doctors came out to us. The head surgeon told Fauzi in no uncertain terms that if he hadn't stopped the bleeding with the towel, my child would have died.
The connection between us and Fauzi, unfortunately, ended for reasons that may be understandable. I think about Fauzi a lot, probably even more, since the October 7th massacre. Is he still alive? Are his children and grandchildren good and valuable people like him? Or did they become the kind of people we saw on October 7th, Black Saturday?
I do not doubt that his family is now suffering from IDF attacks. And I am still convinced that he knew Israelis well and understood that most are not bloodthirsty. Does he know what happened on October 7 and that the Nazis from Hamas are responsible for the suffering of the Gazans?
My heart breaks when I see the suffering of innocents and children who have never done anything wrong. I still want to shout out to Fauzi and others like him: 'If someone were to slaughter indiscriminately, burn your baby, rape your daughter, abuse your injured father, drag your sister into the captivity of hell as if there were a chain of noisy cans tied to a wedding car, and also document all of this and distribute it everywhere, including the celebrations and the killer dances, would you shut up and keep your heads down? Turn the other cheek? Or punish immediately and forcefully for these inhuman acts?'
Judi Nir MozesPhoto: Oz MualemI pray that Fauzi has not changed and that his family members were not among the terrorists or those that celebrated their horrific acts. And I pray that they are safe and sound. But when I think about my beloved brothers and sisters - including those whose lives have ended even though they are still breathing, about a sweet girl who was saved from hell but not from the trauma, about a nine-month-old baby in captivity, about the thousands of families that will never recover, when I think about all of these, I realize that we have no choice but to react, even when the reaction hurts the innocent. The sole culprits are the Nazis from Hamas.
First published: 08:44, 10.27.23