"What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured," she says.
"It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on,"
They (...) set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. "Obviously, we told them we couldn't wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn't understand."
Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. "I don't remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital," she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could "certainly" have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.
Recently, two of our pregnant patients here were tear-gassed in their homes ... The women couldn't breathe and went into premature labour. By the time we got there, the babies had been delivered stillborn.
Of course this particular story might be propaganda. But it's a rare woman who'll kill her own son for propaganda. And there are a LOT of other stories like this, where Israeli troops prevent pregnant women from getting to hospitals while they're in labor.
And sure, not all israelis are for this barbarity. But there are enough for it that the government doesn't change and suddenly act civilized. It's sad, I've always loved the idea of Israel. It's too bad that it's turning into South Africa in the bad old days of apartheid.
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