'Abdel helped save my life - and then risked his on a Gaza mercy mission'
Let me tell you a story about a remarkable man called Abdel Hammad.
Back in 1948 his Palestinian family were made refugees and forced out of their home in Jaffa when the Israeli state was created. He was born in Iraq and lived in Jordan before moving to England in the 1980s.
For the past 30 years Abdel has been a transplant surgeon at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, performing more than 2,000 life-saving operations, and was part of the team that allowed me to give my son a kidney.
Three years ago, during an annual post-donation check-up in which I complained about too many toilet visits, he ordered blood tests then phoned to say I might have prostate cancer, telling me to seek urgent treatment. I did, surgeons whipped out the tumour and I’m now cancer-free.
But Abdel wasn’t just content with saving lives on his doorstep. For the past decade, as part of the Liverpool International Transplant Initiative, he has been travelling to Gaza to carry out operations at the Al-Shifa hospital which, due to chronic overcrowding, power cuts and medical shortages means patients on dialysis are effectively on Death Row.
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On October 6 Abdel entered the Strip, planning to carry out four transplants in four days, then return home. But war changed everything.
His son Salim, a 34-year-old doctor in Oxford, told me of the agony he, his mother and his three siblings have been through this past month, especially going for days without contact due to Israel taking down the internet.
“When we spoke to him on the phone, especially when he was in Gaza City, you could hear incoming rockets. It’s been terrifying,” said Salim.
The 67-year-old was moved to the Rafah border where he spent more than three weeks in a UN hostel, sleeping 12-to-a-room on a mattress on the floor. The water was scarce and some days he went without proper food.
On Wednesday, Abdel was told he was listed to leave Gaza but when he turned up at the Rafah crossing it was utter chaos and the border had closed.
On Thursday afternoon he finally crossed into Egypt, but the family are still angry at his treatment, especially with the Foreign Office who were worse than useless throughout the ordeal.
“He was being held against his will, abandoned by our government, a pawn in a nightmare, in serious danger as thousands died around him,” said Salim.
Defenders of Israel’s indiscriminate massacre of 9,000 civilians argue that the people in Gaza voted for the Hamas butchers who carried out the October 7 atrocities so must live with the consequences.
But Abdel Hammad, like the majority of today’s Palestinians, didn’t vote for Hamas. The Israel Defence Force (IDF) claim Hamas are using people as human shields, so they are legitimate collateral damage. But Abdel was there to shield humans from death.
This is a man who helped save my life, my son’s and thousands of others, who paid out of his own pocket to travel to Gaza in the hope of keeping alive people who, even before October 7, were denied a decent health service.
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The IDF passes off killing innocents as the unintended consequences of war. But bombing hospitals, schools, flats and mosques is a choice. Abdel could have been lying dead beneath the rubble for no other crime than doing what he always does. Save lives.
What a waste that would have been – and what a waste are all the murdered innocents he leaves behind.
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