Three of Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish’s young daughters were killed in 2009 when an Israeli tank shelled their home in Gaza. Now based in Canada and internationally recognised for his human rights advocacy, he talked to Joanna Wane before flying to New Zealand for the premiere of a new documentary about his life.
Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish had left his daughters’ room seconds before the first shell hit. Mayar, 15, was sitting at her desk, studying by candlelight because the power was out. Bassan, a 21-year-old university student, was curled up on the bottom bunk bed with Aya, 13. Shatha, 16, was chatting with her 17-year-old cousin, Noor.
Aiming directly at their bedroom window, the tank fired again. Only Shatha survived. “They were drowning in their blood,” says Abuelaish as he recounts the events of that night in a new documentary I Shall Not Hate, which is to have its international premiere at the Doc Edge film festival this week. “I can’t recognise them. At that moment, I lost faith in humanity.”
Up to 1400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in Operation Cast Lead, a 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip that began in late December 2008. Watching news reports of that now, only the scale of destruction distinguishes it from the bombardment by Israeli forces today as the war in Gaza approaches its ninth month.
With no international media allowed across the border, the deaths of four girls in the Jabalia refugee camp, where the Abuelaish family lived, would normally have barely registered on the casualty list.
Instead, the human cost was laid bare for all to see when the immediate aftermath of the explosions was aired live on Israeli television. Some believe the dramatic broadcast changed the course of the conflict, with a unilateral ceasefire called two days later.
Twenty-five children lived in the five-storey apartment block Abuelaish and his brothers had built in Jabalia for their extended family in one of the most densely populated areas of the strip (refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank have existed for generations now, evolving from tents into densely constructed neighbourhoods).
Before the Israeli offensive was launched on Hamas in 2008, Abuelaish had been in a unique position, able to cross relatively freely into Israel, where he worked as an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Tel HaShomer medical centre, the first Palestinian doctor to work on staff in an Israeli hospital.
After the border closed, he began phoning in news reports from within the Gaza Strip to Channel 10 reporter Shlomi Eldar. On January 16, 2009, Eldar was on air in the Tel Aviv studio when gut instinct compelled him to answer Abuelaish’s unscheduled call.
In heart-stopping footage shown in the documentary, a shocked Eldar streams the audio as Abuelaish howls with grief amid the screams and background chaos. With the Red Cross barred from entering the conflict zone, he begs for medical help to be sent for Shatha, who’s seriously injured, and his brother’s 12-year-old daughter, Ghaida, who has suffered a severe head wound.
When they finally make it to an ambulance several blocks away, a video crew captures a distraught Abuelaish, his tracksuit covered in blood. “I’m the doctor who treats Israeli patients,” he appeals to the camera, in a state of near-collapse. “Truly, is this what you do? This is peace?”
Abuelaish’s response that night to the loss of his daughters with a public call for co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians, as equal citizens, was viewed as radical by both sides. Over the past 15 years, he’s been nominated five times for a Nobel Peace Prize for his ongoing advocacy for reconciliation and an end to the bloodshed.
Born in Jabalia to Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, his story was already an extraordinary one before his private tragedy became broadcast news. After winning a scholarship to study medicine in Egypt, he specialised in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of London and completed a master’s degree in public health at Harvard. Setting up a clinic in the camp, he provided free medical care and in 2006 stood (unsuccessfully) as an independent candidate in the landmark elections that brought Hamas to power.
Just four months before their home was shelled, Abuelaish’s wife, Nadia, died of leukaemia, leaving him to raise their eight children alone. Tensions between Israel and Hamas had already led him to explore career opportunities offshore and he was in Belgium when Nadia was rushed to hospital. A direct flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv takes four and a half hours. However, due to restrictions on Palestinians entering Israel, Abuelaish flew via Germany and then Turkey to Jordan, where he was held on the Israeli side of the border for several hours. Nadia was unconscious in intensive care by the time he arrived and died a few days later.
Inspired by his 2010 memoir, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity, the new documentary is a Canadian-French co-production that worked with a Palestinian crew inside Gaza. To deflect accusations of a political agenda, the project had no Israeli or Palestinian financial backing, although the director, Tal Barda, is a French-American filmmaker who was born in Jerusalem and lives in Tel Aviv.
The fact she’s Jewish is irrelevant, Abuelaish told the Herald, speaking via Zoom from his home in Canada, where he’s now based at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Health. “This is a universal message of hope, of humanity,” he says. “I deal with people as people, and she is a wonderful human being.”
Both Abuelaish and Barda are travelling to New Zealand for Doc Edge and will hold a Q&A session after a screening in Christchurch on June 26, before the festival moves to Auckland and Wellington in July. Repeatedly reliving the loss of his daughters is an emotionally exhausting process for Abuelaish, but he feels compelled to keep sharing their story, especially given the current crisis in his homeland.
“It will be hard to watch the film and to speak after. Every time, it is new for me, so it’s very emotional,” he says. “If I could know that my daughters were the last sacrifice in a way to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, then I would accept it. They were not the last.”
“Why were they chosen and why was I saved? If I had stayed [in the room for] a few more seconds, I would be gone with them and no one would know - as is happening now, where Palestinians are just numbers and the world is either silent, indifferent or complicit.”
The personal toll has continued to mount for Abuelaish, who had been back to visit family and friends in Gaza only months before Israel launched its attack after the Hamas-led massacres on October 7. Twenty-two members of his extended family were killed within the first two weeks. Last month, he learned his eldest sister had died when her home was bombed and her son had been killed in the street.
I Shall Not Hate closes with footage showing entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Some of his relatives have been forced to relocate up to 15 times, and his daughters’ graves were destroyed when the cemetery was bombed. Gaza has become a ghost, says Abuelaish, who believes trying to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli divide by military means is futile. “It only leads to more bloodshed, more hatred, more violence and, most importantly, more extremism.”
“I know the meaning of loss. I feel the pain of anyone who loses an innocent human being. But hatred is a fire, it’s a poison. It’s a heavy weight that doesn’t allow you to move forward. We have a long path and we need to keep moving without fear to continue the fight for justice, for dignity and for humanity. And that is the message of the film - not to be trapped in hatred, because hatred is a contagious, destructive disease.”
It’s a message the world seems ready to hear. Extra sessions were added due to demand when the documentary premiered at the Copenhagen Film Festival in March and it won the Audience Award at the Movies That Matter Festival in the Hague.
I Shall Not Hate also follows Abuelaish’s fight for the Israeli Defence Force to acknowledge accountability for the death of his daughters. Official explanations for the deliberately targeted attack on a civilian building have ranged from a sighting of snipers on the roof to claims shrapnel removed from his niece’s body came from a Hamas rocket.
Despite the intransigency on both sides, Abuelaish believes a one-state solution with equal citizenship rights is the only way forward. He questions why all Palestinians are held responsible for the actions of Hamas, when all Americans are not considered accountable for the former presidency of Donald Trump or all Israelis for the right-wing Netanyahu coalition government, which was democratically elected in 2022. No elections have been held in Gaza since 2006. A poll released by a Palestinian research institute in March showed support for Hamas as a political party had fallen to 34 per cent among Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Also screening at Doc Edge this month is the world premiere of We Will Dance Again, a harrowing documentary on the Hamas attack at the Nova music festival, which left 364 people dead. The festival site in Israel’s Negev Desert is only 10km from the Jabalia refugee camp. “Do you think the people who live there know what is happening next door to the Palestinians in Gaza? They don’t know. And they want to live in denial,” says Abuelaish, who acknowledges emotions are still running high among his Israeli friends. “You have to understand your life is not more precious than others.”
“What happened on October 7 was shocking to all and we need to face it, not hide our heads in the sand like the ostrich. At the same time, the world wasn’t created on October 7. I want them to dance again. I hope they can dance again, with the Palestinian people side by side as equals.”
In memory of Bessan, Mayar, Aya and Noor, Abuelaish established the Daughters for Life Foundation in 2010 to create accessible education opportunities for young women from the Middle East, whatever their race or religion. He believes women are the key to driving change in the world and is keen to pursue the possibility of collaborating with universities here.
Abuelaish has been to New Zealand once before, as a guest speaker at the Auckland Writers’ Festival after the publication of his memoir. Incredibly, he discovered relatives living in Auckland and was also contacted by former neighbours from Jabalia who recognised his mother’s photo in the book.
“This gives me hope,” he says. “The Palestinian people are a living nation. You find them everywhere, and that’s important for our survival. Nothing can put an end to our dreams.”
I Shall Not Hate screens in Christchurch (June 21 and 26), Wellington (July 10) and Auckland (July 10) as part of the international Doc Edge festival. For the full programme, go to docedge.nz.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.