Martin Fletcher tells the story of Wafa al Biri, the 21 year old Palestinian woman whose greatest wish was to kill 30-50 Jews, including the doctor who saved her life.
When a gas cooker blew up while she was making dinner, burning her everywhere, she was taken from the Palestinian hospital to the Israeli hospital at Soroka.
Dr. Yuval Krieger, the Israeli doctor who treated Wafa, said she arrived from the Palestinian hospital of Shifa with infected burn wounds. The treatment she had was not good and her burns were dressed incorrectly.
"Did you save her life?" Krieger was asked.
"I believe so, yes," he replied.
---
Before she was burned her mom told me that Wafa was a very funny girl, very active, laughing a lot," Latifah said. "But after the burning she became very tired and depressed. And often Wafa said to me, ‘I can't live like this, I am so ugly, I want to commit suicide.’ She had a fiance. But after the accident he left her. Then she kept crying, ‘Nobody will want me, I am too ugly, my body is scarred everywhere’."
When Wafa was released from Soroka, she didn't want to leave, Latifah said. "She was screaming, shouting, ‘Please don't let me go. I am better here. I'm going to die.’ But they made her leave, on a stretcher, and they took her home to Gaza."
---
In the Jabalya refugee camp, jilted by her fiance, surrounded by shamed brothers, scared parents and poverty, Wafa al-Biri was the worst of cases.
She was easy pickings for someone with a bomb and a cause. According to Wafa, the al-Aqsa militants came knocking. Here was a vulnerable young woman, willing to die, and moreover with the golden ticket — a pass for humanitarian reasons to a hospital in Israel.
After all, who would check the underwear of a sick young woman on her way to the hospital?
Posted by Jill Fallon at June 29, 2005 3:33 PM | Permalink