On a rainy day in February 2012, Abed Salama received the kind of phone call every parent dreads. His 5-year-old son Milad had been excited about a kindergarten trip to a play centre on the Jerusalem-Ramallah road in the West Bank. But, Abed learned, there had been an accident. A bad one. Milad’s bus had been hit by a jack-knifing truck-trailer that slid across a rough road in the rain. The old school bus overturned on to its doors, trapping the children inside. Then it caught fire.
It took 20 minutes for passersby to get the driver, teachers and children out of the burning bus. During this time, one of the rescuers was fatally injured and several children died. Not a single firefighter, soldier or police officer came to help as dying children were dragged to safety, despite frantic phone calls to emergency services and the army checkpoint with a water tank just seconds away. There was an Israeli police headquarters nearby and the burning bus was surrounded by Israeli settlements stocked with fire engines and ambulances.
A Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance, which had to negotiate a checkpoint, brought the first paramedic 20 minutes after the crash. He found small dead bodies, a fiercely burning bus and two badly injured adults. Helpers had already taken surviving children to hospitals, although this in itself was complicated – getting to the best hospital in Jerusalem was only possible for drivers with a certain kind of ID. Most had to take the flooded road to a hospital in Ramallah.
Israeli ambulances coming from Jerusalem had apparently been delayed by the army, which was tragically slow to open a gate at a checkpoint. Some emergency responders, unfamiliar with Palestinian roads and villages, told Israeli media later that it took them “quite some time to find the exact location because it was in Palestinian territory”. But this was a busy highway under total Israeli control, governed by the Israeli army and patrolled by Israeli police.
The tragedy might have faded from history without Nathan Thrall, a Jewish Jerusalem-based journalist who wrote a lacerating piece about it for the New York Review of Books. Thrall spoke to Milad’s father Abed about the day he spent looking for his young son, stymied by traffic jams, checkpoints and byzantine regulations.
Thrall’s magazine story has now been expanded into a beautifully written book that reads more like a novel than investigative journalism, although that’s what it is – he spent years tracking down and talking to everyone associated with the crash: rescuers, parents, friends, drivers, paramedics, nearby settlers and military. His research is meticulous, his tone neutral, his conclusions damning.
Despite the cool prose, outrage runs through the book like a buried river.
Abed and his wife and children live in Anata, near Jerusalem. Confusingly, half is officially annexed within the sovereign state of Israel and half is not. “It’s all equally neglected,” Thrall told an interviewer from the website Jewish Currents. “[It’s] a stark illustration that what matters is not the legal status of the territory, but who lives there.”
Thrall’s book shows that the tragedy resulted from what he calls the “architecture of occupation”, a system that confines Palestinians to underregulated schools and vehicles, poorly maintained roads and a dangerous lack of emergency services.
Thrall begins his book by fleshing out the lives of his protagonists long before the accident, although it remains the dark heart of the book – we return to the burning bus again and again, learning more about Milad’s fate each time.
The suspense of not knowing (I won’t reveal the answer here) might be unbearable, whispers the narrative, but it is nothing compared with the suffering of a parent who does not know if their child is dead or alive.
