‘Text Me You Haven’t Died’ – My Sister was the 166th Doctor to Be Murdered in Gaza

Ramzy Baroud

 October 18, 2024
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Dr. Soma Baroud, was killed on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis.

“Your lives will continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children, who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”

These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.

Dr. Soma Baroud was murdered on October 9 when Israeli warplanes bombed a taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

I am still unable to understand whether she was on her way to the hospital, where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?

The news of her murder – or, more accurately assassination, as Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors – arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page.

“Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area ..,” the post read.

It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, and the 42,010th on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.

I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis strike.

I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.

I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity. “Every morning,” I said, “just type: ‘we are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.

But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, though never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favorite novels, and so on.

“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she said on more than one occasion, before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes .. totally .. I agree .. one hundred percent.”

For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.

I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter”, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.

The first born, and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us.

She was just a child, when my eldest brother Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a US-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.

Two years after the death of the first Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy may carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.

My father began his life as a child laborer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again a laborer; that’s because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the war of 1967, known as the Naksa.

A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way.

When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Though her skin healed, cuts on her fingers, due to individually wrapping thousands of razors, remained a testament to the difficult life she lived.

“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, ultimately five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.

Years later, my parents would send her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, though never her own.

She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital, at Nasser Hospital among other medical centers. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, opening a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor, and did all she could to heal those victimized by war.

Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza that truly changed the face of medicine, collectively putting great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality, but also the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.

When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the war, she told me that “when aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women – doctors, nurses, and other medical staff – would surround her in total adoration.”

At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband, himself a professor of law, and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.

Life, even under siege, at least for Soma and her family, seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, thus her love affair and constant citation from García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or went missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories and hope.

“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband was executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis.

But since the body remained missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and to give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.

To maximize their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza.

This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, traveling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion, and every massacre.

“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”

These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month.

“My heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble,” she wrote.

“This is not a story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I wrote or spoke. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family,” she continued.

A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbors in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.

There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate ..

My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I will do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Türkiye, and that we will shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.

Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded with her.

Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance, I thought maybe my sister was indeed gone.

Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.

Then, another bag, with the name ‘Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud’ written across the thick white plastic. Her colleagues carried her body and gently laid it on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to verify her identity. I looked the other way.

I refuse to see her but in the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”

But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?

My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.

No more messages from her.

Listen to our interview with Ramzy Baroud on the most recent episode of CounterPunch Radio.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

 

Social rank may determine if animals live fast, die young

Dartmouth study of macaques suggests leaders put immediate survival above longevity.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Dartmouth College

 

image: 

Macaques on Thailand’s Koram Island may engage in food-washing based on their social rank. The researchers set trays of sliced cucumber mixed with varying amounts of sand on the beach to observe how thoroughly the animals cleaned their food before eating it. They found that lower-ranked animals (pictured) first washed their cucumber slices in the ocean, often well past the point it was clean.

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Credit: Amanda Tan

Anyone who has picnicked on the beach has experienced the unpleasant crunch of a sandwich with a surprise helping of sand. But for primates, the tolerance for sand may depend on whether their energy is better spent reproducing and fighting rivals or on protecting their teeth from a mouthful of grit, according to a new Dartmouth study.

Social rank may determine whether animals prioritize immediate energy consumption over long-term health, or vice versa, the researchers report in the journal eLife. They observed the eating habits of long-tailed macaques on Thailand's Koram Island and found that the dominant and lowest-ranked animals briefly rubbed sand-covered food on their fur or between their paws before devouring it, along with most of the sand, and moving on to the next morsel.

Middle-ranked monkeys, however, having more time on their paws, carried their food to the water's edge and washed it in the sea to remove the sand. These animals often expended time and energy scrubbing their snacks past the point when they were clean and would even amble down the beach on their hind legs with their front paws full of food.

Nathaniel Dominy, the study's corresponding author and the Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth, says the findings provide insight into how animals—even those in hierarchical groups—choose survival strategies based on individual needs. The study supports the disposable soma hypothesis, which proposes that animals sometimes prioritize immediate survival and reproduction over longevity, Dominy says, adding, "Delayed gratification has its limits."

That may be the case for monkeys at the top and the bottom of the social ladder, for whom life is short and hard, Dominy says. As a result, these animals consume and conserve energy whenever they can. Existing research shows that sand causes significant damage to macaque tooth enamel. But for dominant males especially, that may not be important in a life fraught with challengers.

"High-ranking males are constantly lunging at or chasing other males, behaviors that maximize their siring of offspring. So, they need to eat rapidly to make up for that energy expenditure and that's exactly what we saw them doing," Dominy says. "They just stuff food into their mouths—sand be damned—because they don't have time to walk to the water. It's the urgency of now that matters, not their teeth. To humans, it seems like a shrewd calculation."

The monkeys that wash their food might instead be playing a long game, says Amanda Tan, the study's co-corresponding author and an assistant professor of anthropology at Durham University. Tan worked on the project as a postdoctoral scholar in Dominy's research group at Dartmouth.

"We think these animals invest a lot more time in washing their food because they cannot afford to damage their teeth and compromise their longevity," Tan says. "This strategy could allow them to maximize their potential reproductive success by living longer and producing more offspring over their lifetime."

The findings also could shed light on how the wear and pitting observed in the fossilized teeth of early humans relate to social structure and access to water, Dominy says.

"What if tooth wear is telling us about rank, not food properties," Dominy asks. "If we find more variable wear on a male hominin tooth, the classic interpretation is that it's the result of a varied diet. We ought to consider the possibility that he was eating quickly and couldn't be bothered to clean his food. Or maybe he lived in an area that was historically arid. We have cause to be more open-minded about variable tooth wear."

To observe the macaques' eating habits, Tan and the study's first author, Jessica Rosien '21, arranged plastic trays on the beach that contained cucumber slices. The slices were either on their own, placed on top of sand, or buried in sand. Rosien and Tan recorded the animals every day for six weeks as they foraged for cucumbers in the trays, capturing nearly 1,300 instances of food-handling by 42 individual macaques.

The monkeys that washed their food devoted an average of five seconds to over a minute to each cucumber slice—often washing multiple slices—while the average amount of time spent just brushing sand off a slice was effectively zero, the researchers report. That time makes a difference. In lab trials with sand-coated cucumbers, the researchers found that washing removed 93% of sand and brushing removed only 75%.

The researchers determined social rank using established methods of observing how the animals interact. But the social order was not subtle, Rosien says. She recalls a low-ranking male that, rejected by his peers, spent his time sitting next to her on the beach. A high-ranked female would fearlessly challenge other macaques for their cucumbers and steal anything Rosien left unattended, including her backpack of supplies. "I loved getting to know the different monkeys' personalities over time and I definitely got a sense of the impact of social rank," she says.

Before the study, Tan worked on Koram Island for years observing how the macaques developed skills using tools through social learning. She knew that some animals washed their food while others did not. It was Dominy who wondered if there was a rank-based trade-off between getting calories quickly versus preventing tooth wear, Tan says. "To our knowledge, no one had tested the hypothesis that food-washing served as an adaptive function for removing grit," she says.

Food-washing among primates is not common, Dominy says. The Koram Island macaques were first observed doing so after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Their habit became a draw for tourists, who, before authorities put a stop to it, would throw fruit on the beach from boats to watch the animals wash it in the surf.

The other known instance is among the Japanese macaques on Japan's Kōjima Island. In the 1950s, researchers studying the animals lured them toward the beach with wheat and sweet potatoes to observe them more clearly.

In 1953, a young female named Imo first picked up a sandy sweet potato and washed it in a stream. Five years later, the other animals had taken up the practice, washing their food in the sea. Today, 92% of the Kōjima Island macaques wash their food.

"I love the story of Imo," Rosien says. "It shows how an individual can cause a shift in a whole population. To see such a significant advance in real time makes it easier to understand how small changes can lead to big changes."

The spread of a similar habit in two independent populations separated by 50 years and 5,000 miles speaks to the value of culture, Dominy says.

"You have to be experimental and entrepreneurial to invent a new behavior out of whole cloth, but it has to be clear enough that other individuals will understand its purpose and copy it," he says. "And they have to be smart enough to recognize when another animal has figured out something valuable. That's what culture is—seeing the value of a new behavior and adopting it."

The value for the macaques of washing their food was considered so obvious, no one had studied it before, the researchers write in their paper. "Even if something seems intuitive, it’s still important to be curious, ask questions, and test assumptions," Tan says.

"In this case," she continues, "our study provides a fuller picture of the various trade-offs that animals may juggle relative to their place in a social structure and gives us a better understanding of how that leads individuals to behave distinctly."

First author Jessica Rosien '21 recorded nearly 1,300 instances of food-handling by 42 individual macaques over six weeks. Monkeys that washed their food devoted an average of five seconds to over a minute to each cucumber slice—often washing multiple slices—while the average amount of time spent just brushing sand off a slice was effectively zero, the researchers report. The researchers determined social rank using established methods of observing how the animals interact.

Credit

Amanda Tan

Video of macaques washing and [VIDEO] | 

Video of macaques washing and brushing. (VIDEO)

Dartmouth College

Caption

Dominant macaques briefly brushed cucumber slices from the experimental setup on their fur before eating them, along with a mouthful of tooth-degrading sand. Lower-ranked macaques carried their slices to the ocean and washed them obsessively before eating. The macaques picked up their habit of washing food after the 2004 tsunami. Afterward, tourists would throw fruit from boats to watch the animals food-wash, but the government put a stop to the practice.

Credit

Jessica Rosien

Journal

eLife

DOI

10.7554/eLife.98520.1 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Food-washing monkeys recognize the law of diminishing returns

Unexpected link between grooming and physiological stress in wild baboons

Swansea University

 

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A female chacma baboon grooms a male on the Cape Peninsula, South Africa,

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Credit: Charl Steenkamp

A new study from Swansea University has revealed a surprising relationship between grooming behaviour and physiological stress in wild female baboons, addressing a crucial gap in our understanding of how sociality is linked to health and fitness in animals.

Published in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers studied wild chacma baboons in South Africa. Tracking collars with motion sensors provided data on how much time each baboon spent giving or receiving grooming. The baboons’ physiological stress levels were estimated by measuring concentrations of glucocorticoid metabolites in their faeces.

Consistent with previous work, the team found that higher average grooming rates were linked to lower average stress levels, suggesting that grooming has long-term positive effects on health and fitness. However, when the researchers time-matched the high-resolution grooming and physiological stress data, they found that when baboons spent more time grooming (both giving and receiving), higher physiological stress levels followed, contrary to expectations.

This finding suggests that the long-term positive link between physiological stress and grooming is unlikely to be subserved by grooming itself because, in the short term, grooming is physiologically costly.

High-resolution grooming data from collars can now be used to study how this short-term hormone–behaviour relationship might change across environmental and social contexts and, if deployed in other social animals, confirm how widespread this phenomenon is.

Dr Charlotte Christensen, a former Swansea University PhD student now based at the University of Zurich, commented: "Our findings challenge the conventional view that grooming is purely relaxing and suggest that the immediate physiological costs may be outweighed by long-term fitness benefits."

Senior author Dr Ines Fürtbauer, head of the Behavioural Ecology & Endocrinology lab at Swansea University, emphasised the broader implications: "This study provides valuable insights into the proximate mechanisms of social bonding and stress regulation. Understanding these dynamics can help us better comprehend the health and survival strategies of social animals."

This research highlights the importance of exploring the link between social behaviours and physiological stress at different time scales, with sometimes counterintuitive results, contributing to the ongoing debate about the costs and benefits of sociality in animals.

 

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Journal

Biology Letters

DOI

10.1098/rsbl.2024.0163 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

More allogrooming is followed by higher physiological stress in wild female baboons

Article Publication Date

7-Aug-2024