About the Author
                                                             

The summer of 2000 carried a rare sense of hope. The Oslo Accords seemed poised to deliver what generations had dreamed of: a Palestinian state and real peace. I remember watching with relief and anticipation when the evening news announced the establishment of a Palestinian state in a matter of weeks. Then came the collapse. The provocative visit by the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, Ariel Sharon, to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the lethal Israeli police crackdown, and suddenly the unravelling of the process. 

Growing up, I had heard whispered and horrified stories of Sabra and Shatila. How in 1982, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were promised international protection in exchange for the retreat of the PLO, promises never kept. Within days the Israeli military had invaded Beirut, officially in order to prevent “violence, bloodshed and chaos”, and unleashed killing brigades on the Palestinian refugee camps. They first encircled the camps, sealing every exit and trapping everyone inside, before cutting of the electricity and coordinating the entry of Phalangist militias, providing them with light so they could continue throughout the dark hours. In two nights, around 3,500 men, women, and children were massacred—the third-largest civilian slaughter in sixty years, after Rwanda and Srebrenica. Witnesses described scalped men, raped women, children with their throats cut. The UN General Assembly condemned it as a genocide. 

Thousands of refugees flooded Gaza hospital in Beirut, believing it safe. As the militiamen approached the hospital, four Palestinian medics waved a white flag, pleading for the hospital to be spared. Three were killed instantly by a grenade, the fourth maimed. When the hospital fell, foreign staff were dragged away at gunpoint, patients were shot in their beds, doctors executed or abducted, nurse Intisar Ismail raped and murdered on the same ward she had been treating patients mere hours before. Hospitals are supposed to be protected under the Geneva Conventions, but in Sabra and Shatila, even neutrality itself was annihilated.

Years later, members of the militias admitted on film that they had been trained and guided by Israeli officers, who even supplied body bags in advance. The film Waltz with Bashir (2008) was one of the first Israeli works to confront this involvement, as the director had served as a soldier during the onslaught. Jewish-American nurse Ellen Siegel has spent decades testifying to what she witnessed: the orchestration of the massacre itself by Israeli forces. When health care is attacked, it is never an accident. It is strategy. It signals that no space is safe, no life sacred, and even healers can be broken. The true nature of these kind of atrocities echo through my own family history.

On my father's side, my grandmother Salomone survived the second world war only because she was lucky enough to live in the unoccupied part of France. My grandfather joined the resistance, laying charges on train rails. Eventually he was caught, and the work camps swallowed him. When liberation came, he walked out scarred but unbroken. One of his first acts as a free man, was to have a Star of David tattooed into the flesh of his palm. A mark he carried everywhere, pressed into the hands he shook, the bread he broke, the life he rebuilt. Thankfully he lived long enough to see it mostly fade, but not old enough to see history repeating itself and experience the unbearable pain of watching Jewish ancestral suffering twisted into justification for new abomination. 

On my mother’s side, the story is Algeria: 130 years of French colonization. My great-grandfather lost everything—his home, his fields—dispossessed by the French. My uncle took up the fight against the occupation, refusing to stay silent in the face of what Algeria had endured: villages razed, men and women subjected daily to humiliation, beatings, torture at the hands of soldiers. Even mass murders, like the Dahra Enfumade, where 700 tribe members - men, women and children - had fled into caves before being burned and smoked to death by the French. A century later, the burning of a church and barn containing 642 pleople in Oradour-sur-Glane is considered one of the worst atrocities committed on French soil under Nazi occupation. For his resistance, my uncle was called a “terrorist.” After after Algeria’s hard-fought independence that cost the lives of over half a million people, when the depth of colonial cruelty could no longer be denied, he became a hero. Today, a street in Oran bears his name.

I was born between these two legacies—Jewish and Muslim-Arab, survivor and resister. My mother while pregnant used to joke that she was “contributing to the UN’s goal of promoting peace among peoples”, carrying both histories as a promise to the future. She couldn’t have imagined how thoroughly that dream would later be betrayed. I grew up in a world fractured by borders, by faiths, by politics sharpened into weapons. But instead of being torn apart by these divides, I felt an older pull toward the principles of my ancestors, both Arab-Muslim and Jewish. Their histories, though marked by struggle, also carry within them a profound commitment to dignity, compassion, and justice.

In November 2023, I joined Doctors for Gaza, a collective of Dutch health workers defending human rights and medical neutrality. Guided by both my medical oath and an act of inheritance; a refusal to let the world convince me that one half of my blood should despise the other. This book, Healthcare Is Not a Target, is born of that legacy. 

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