A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

Nansy Qawasme is a young mother who had an arranged marriage at 17 years old. Her husband, Azzam, was not what she had hoped for, but she obeyed her parents and not only married him but also had children very quickly. Their neighborhood had become dangerous, and she worried for her children. A class trip to Kids Land for her five-year-old son Salaah was a rare opportunity for enjoyment, and after some hesitation, Nansy caved and signed his permission slip, sending him off with a brand-new Spider-Man backpack. Nansy already had a preternatural sense of fear when there was a knock on her door, with two older women there to tell her about the accident. She frantically packed her daughter and went to the school. As calls came in and rumors spread, she drives from the school to the hospital back to her parents’ home, trying to find information and offering a description of a distinctive Spider-Man backpack. Fearing the worst, she arrives at a different hospital where she meets her husband, who refuses to console or even speak to her because “she’s the one who sent Salaah on the trip” (181).

Livnat Wieder is part of a group of social workers called to help with the victims of the accident, which is entirely outside of her expertise. The hospital as a whole lacks Arabic-speaking staff and is overwhelmed by requests from parents to bypass security checkpoints in order to see their children. One of the few Palestinian staffers, Khalil Khoury, sensed “plenty of racism” in the hospital’s policies but also “felt well treated by his [Jewish] colleagues” (185). He even helped care for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon after he suffered a stroke. Family members flood into the hospital, mostly fathers, due to the relative ease of men earning work permits. Livnat has the awful task of identifying a badly burned but still living child, knowing she must tell a mother “that if the boy was not hers, then her own son was most likely dead” (187). Haya al-Hindi arrives and quickly finds one of her sons relatively unharmed but cannot find her other son, even as the hospital insists that a set of clothes belonged to him.

Haya comforts her friend Nansy, saying that she has found one of her sons, and so Nansy must surely find hers. Her son Salaah is indeed alive but terribly burned and in need of entirely new skin. Haya waits an entire night for news of Abdullah, and as morning dawns and family members assure Haya that Abdullah will soon be found, “the loudspeaker at the mosque announced that Abdullah al-Hindi was dead” (192).

Abed still has no news of Milad the following morning. Representatives of the truck driver ask for a tribal truce, which Abed grants because he blames himself for letting Milad go in the first place. By midday, the news comes in that Milad is in the morgue. The body is not suitable for a traditional Muslim burial, and Abed scoffs at the Palestinian authorities, who declare Milad and the other children to be martyrs. Thrall writes, “The funeral and burial happened so quickly Abed never had a moment alone with Milad. The crowd was so large that he couldn’t get close to him” (197). The next night, Abed receives a call from the Palestinian authorities that angry parents are trying to burn down the school, and they hope he will talk them down. The crowd is relatively small, and Abed is able to persuade them to go home. On the second day of the official mourning period, Ghazl visits Abed’s home, their first encounter in 15 years, although they do not speak directly. The grief drives Abed’s wife Haifa into a withdrawn silence, while Abed speaks of the tragedy often, hoping it could prompt change.

Azzam continues to treat Nansy cruelly, blaming her for their son’s injuries. After several days, she returns to the hospital and insists on seeing Salaah for the first time, but before she can leave, she receives news that he is dead. Thrall writes, “Compounding Nansy’s guilt for signing the permission slip to go on the trip, there was now the deepest regret that she hadn’t said goodbye to Salah” (202). Their family endures a terrible strain, which is not alleviated when Nansy becomes pregnant and bears another son. When she becomes pregnant once again, Azzam demands a divorce and her full share of the restitution from the accident, striking her when she refuses. As his abuse escalates, she leaves with her infant daughter and other children and lives with her parents.

A month after the accident, a film crew arrives at Abed’s house to discuss a story on how some Israelis posted on the internet that they were exuberant at the news of the accident. The journalist Arik Weiss first spoke to many of those who made such comments, who freely spoke under their own names. Abed had heard about the posts, and he connects it with the lack of action at the scene of the accident, as “most people Abed talked to thought the Israeli authorities had wanted the children to die” (209). Arik then meets with two settlers, both of whom had tried to offer condolences and support for the families of the victims. In the film, they eventually meet with Abed, who shows them a picture of Milad, and they insist that no one from their settlement could take joy in such an awful occurrence. When they leave, Abed watches videos on his phone of Milad until he begins to cry.

A year after the accident, Abed’s mother dies, and almost immediately after that, his cousin Ahmad loses a baby to an illness. The stress of the loss begins to cause health problems for Abed, and so when Ahmad asks for his baby son to be buried alongside Milad, he agrees so that he can unearth the grave and finally say goodbye to his son. Ashraf Qayqas is sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but the investigation squarely placed the blame on the driver himself. “For all the blame that was cast, no one—not the investigators, not the lawyers, not the judges—named the true origins of the calamity” (216), the system of occupation that left Palestinians with substandard services and then deprived them of timely emergency care. No one who was a part of that system was ever held accountable.