Eight days in the life of Hamam Mohsem

Maqassad Hospital, East Jerusalem
Monday 29th December 2008 

He was on a ventilator in the Intensive Care Unit – a sixteen-year-old boy who only yesterday was revising for a school examination. Now he lay motionless and heavily sedated, his head and face swathed in bandages.

The neurosurgeon, a small dynamic lady with steel grey hair, told me that he had undergone a 6½ hour operation to remove three rubber bullets, one from the left side of his face, two from deep inside his brain. Some of his brain tissue was damaged and had to be removed. Half an hour after surgery he was moving, trying to remove one of the tubes. But now there were concerns that his brain might be swelling – a not uncommon reaction to injury – so he was to be sedated and ventilated for the next three days.

The doctor was guardedly optimistic that he would survive. However, he had suffered significant damage to the parts of his brain that control movement of the right side of his body, speech and comprehension. He would require lengthy rehabilitation and it was impossible to say at this stage how much recovery would be achieved.

Abu Dis
Tuesday 30th December 2008  

It is not easy to be certain exactly what happened on the evening of Sunday 28th December but what does seem beyond doubt is that this was a peaceful demonstration: a group of women marching to protest against the Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip. They walked steadily up the main street towards a waiting line of Israeli soldiers, the three teenage boys at their head.

Suddenly a soldier - or maybe more than one - who had been hiding behind a shop stepped out and fired a canister of rubber bullets at the boys. Rubber bullets are in fact small metal balls with a thin covering of rubber: they are designed to cause pain but not to penetrate, and to be fired at crowds from a distance of several metres. About fifteen bullets are stored in a metal canister like the one in the photograph, which is fired from a gun. The canister bursts open releasing the balls, whilst the canister falls to the ground.

The soldier fired at Hamam from less than five metres away (some say as little as two metres) and the metal canister hit him on the head, fracturing his skull. He fell to the ground and was dragged to the side of the road by a soldier. That's his blood all over the canister.

An ambulance was called but took 20 minutes to reach the scene. There was then a forty minute delay before the soldiers would allow the paramedics to leave the vehicle to tend to the boy. Eventually he was taken to the Maqassad Hospital in East Jerusalem. But his parents were not allowed to go with them - they did not have permits to enter East Jerusalem!

And that was how I came to be involved: on the Sunday evening I was telephoned by a contact in Abu Dis who told me what had happened and asked if I would go along to the hospital to find out how the boy was.

I saw Hamam several times over the next few days: he remained in a critical condition. I was allowed to read his hospital records - most of which were in English – and learned that the skull fracture and brain damage was more severe than I had originally thought, and that bone fragments as well as bullets had entered his brain.  

His parents arrived shortly after I did on Monday and I saw them most days – although sometimes they were not permitted to pass through the checkpoint.  On two or three occasions the doctors tried to reduce his sedation and wean him off the ventilator but without success. We were all getting anxious.

Maqassad Hospital, East Jerusalem 
Monday 5th January 2009

When I arrived this morning, not having seen him for two days, I was delighted to see how much Hamam had improved. He was propped up in bed, his eyes wide open and breathing on his own. Even better, he was moving his right leg a little although not his right arm. His neurosurgeon is delighted at his improvement, although she stresses that it is early days yet and things could still go wrong.

This has been a stressful week for everyone involved – Hamam’s family and friends, the hospital staff, and us too. We feel very privileged that we have been able to offer our support at this time.

Hamam has a long road ahead of him. He will need a great deal of rehabilitation which I hope will be made available to him, and it will be at least a year before we know how much movement he can regain in his right side and whether or not he will regain his speech and comprehension how much speech and cognition he will have.  But he has come a long way in eight days.

As to the incident in which he was wounded, we believe that it was without doubt an abuse of his human rights and we are taking advice as to what further action should be taken.