| Bombed town in Gaza | Music | 00:00 |
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| BORMANN: From the ruins of their towns and cities, the people of Gaza can barely comprehend the ferocity of a twenty-two day war, but for all the destruction, for all the thousands of shells and rockets that struck here, one single attack has left a mark like no other. | 00:19
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| Abuelaish family house | What happened at this house late in the afternoon on the 16th of January would reverberate far beyond the borders of Gaza. | 00:43 |
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| Music/ Man crying | 00:51 |
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| OSHRAT KOTLER (TV Presenter, Channel 10 Israel): Of course it would be a great relief to know that we didn’t do it, | 01:07 |
| Kotler | you know, you carry a guilt upon yourself. | 01:10 |
| Abuelaish family house | Music | 01:13 |
| Aerial. Gaza buildings | BORMANN: It was a military blunder that prompted a nation to examine its conscience - the ordeal of a family named Abuelaish. This was a war story played out on prime time TV. It outraged some, inspired others and introduced to the world a remarkable man who sought peace through extraordinary adversity. | 01:16 |
| Photos. Dr Abuelaish graduation photo | He’s the doctor from Gaza who uses medicine to bridge the divide between Palestinians and Israelis. | 01:41 |
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| Izzeldin Abuelaish is an imminent Harvard educated gynaecologist and obstetrician. | 01:50 |
| Doctor Abuelaish walks through hospital | At home he treats Palestinians for free and even pays for their hospital expenses from his own pocket, but he’s a doctor who knows no border. In Israel, Dr Abuelaish is a Hebrew speaking specialist and a pioneer of this nation’s IVF programme. DR ABUELAISH: The voice | 01:57 |
| Doctor Abuelaish | of support, the voice of peace is becoming stronger. | 02:17 |
| Doctor hugs israelii soldier | Music | 02:23 |
| Israeli flag |
| 02:27 |
| Rabbi walks with Bormann | RABBI YITZCHAK YELLIN: Well, I couldn’t believe that here’s an Arab speaking Hebrew as well as I spoke Hebrew and here I am studying Arabic. | 02:32 |
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| BORMANN: The Palestinian Muslim doctor has formed an unlikely friendship with the Rabbi he studied with. | 02:38 |
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| RABBI YITZCHAK YELLIN: This man delivered life, he brought life into the world. | 02:43 |
| Rabbi Yellin | I think at one period of time he delivered more Jewish babies in this country than any other Jewish obstetrician. | 02:46 |
| Gaza bombings |
| 02:54 |
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| BORMANN: It was the final hours of the Gaza war and Dr Abuelaish was at home with seven of his eight children. His wife had died of leukaemia only months earlier. | 03:00 |
| Oshrat in make up | Sixty kilometres away in Tel Aviv, Oshrat Kotler was preparing for her nightly news program on Israel’s Channel 10. | 03:14 |
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| OSHRAT KOTLER: [Channel 10, Israel] Dr Abuelaish was suppose to give us an interview that day in the studio, | 03:25 |
| Oshrat | because we were in touch with him during the war to see how he is… how is life on the other side. | 03:30 |
| Oshrat and guests in studio | BORMANN: Instead the doctor phones in. On air, reporter Shlomi Eldar takes the call and switches to speakerphone. | 03:35 |
| Eldar holds phone | DR ABUELAISH: [Extremely upset on phone] “My God! What have we done to them? My God… my God… My God, what have we done?” OSHRAT KOTLER: He was crying out loud “my daughters, my daughters, we were hit. | 03:48 |
| Oshrat. Super: | My daughters are dead. My daughters are wounded.” I mean he was… he was out of his mind of course. He was freaking out over there. | 04:03 |
| Excerpt from news program | SHLOMI ELDAR: “Dr Abuelaish, tell me where you are living. Maybe they’ll send an ambulance to your house… maybe they’ll allow an ambulance to your house.” | 04:10 |
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| DR ABUELAISH: “I wanted to try to save them but they died from head wounds immediately, Shlomi.” | 04:17 |
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| OSHRAT KOTLER: After four or five minutes | 04:29 |
| Oshrat | I signed to the control panel that I, I think we should cut the sounds and maybe | 04:30 |
| Shlomi on call to doctor | release Shlomi and the other correspondents to try to help him backstage and that’s what happened. | 04:36 |
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| SHLOMI ELDAR: “Maybe I will ask you if I can leave the set, because I can’t hang up on this conversation. I just can’t hang up on this conversation. Excuse me, and I’ll leave the set.” | 04:43 |
| Medivac team attend family members | BORMANN: Off air, Shlomi Eldar calls military commanders and soon the doctor’s brother and his seriously injured seventeen-year-old daughter Shada become the first Palestinian casualties of the war to be evacuated to an Israeli hospital. Dr Abuelaish directs the medivac. | 04:54 |
| Dr Abuelaish with medivac members | DR ABUELAISH: [Distraught at the scene] “I’m the doctor who treats Israeli patients! Truly, this is what you do? This is the peace?” | 05:13 |
| Doctor’s shelled house | BORMANN: The two Israeli tank shells that had slammed into the house had killed the doctor’s daughters, | 05:27 |
| Photo. Bisan | twenty-year-old Bisan, | 05:32 |
| Photo. Mayar and Aya | fifteen-year-old Mayar and thirteen year old Aya. | 05:35 |
| Photo. Noor | Also to die in the same room was the doctor’s seventeen-year-old niece, Noor. | 05:40 |
| Bombed streets. Ruins of buildings | That broadcast into living rooms had delivered something Israelis hadn’t experienced before, a reality television account of life in Gaza under Israeli attack, but more than that, all of a sudden, the killing seemed very close and the victims seemed too familiar for comfort. | 05:53 |
| Doctor faces press at hospital |
| 06:16 |
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| BORMANN: Crippled with grief, Dr Abuelaish faced the world’s media at the hospital where he once taught. | 06:24 |
| Doctor addresses media | DR ABUELAISH: I was believing, fully believing that health can be a bridge for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Within the borders of the hospital all are equal! Why not to be outside equal! Why not! My children, my children were involved…. OSHRAT KOTLER: Thousands of Israelis which he didn’t know called him to apologise, to express their feelings, to express their grief. | 06:30 |
| Oshrat. Super: | But on the other hand, like thousands of Israelis were, were crazy with anger because of us, because we gave him the stage to express his tragedy. | 06:54 |
| Night vision. Shelling of Gaza | BORMANN: Many Israelis were already blaming the victim. They’d been told by their military leaders that homes in Gaza were attacked only when it was thought Hamas militants were inside or when a home was being used to store arms. Other officials were suggesting it was a Hamas rocket that had hit the house. | 07:09 |
| Onlookers abuse doctor | At the hospital, the distraught doctor was set upon by onlookers. | 07:32 |
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| ISRAELI WOMAN: My son is in the parachute regiment. Who knows what you had in your house? Nobody says anything about that… nobody’s talking about that! | 07:41 |
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| DR ABUELAISH: They don’t want to know the truth. They don’t want … they don’t want to know the truth. | 07:50 |
| Photo. Doctor’s daughters | DR ABUELAISH: My oldest daughter she was the most lovely daughter, the closest one to me. She was the mother, the sister to her sisters after I lost my wife. | 08:04 |
| Doctor and Bormann look at photos | This is Aya… Aya with the blue eyes, very beautiful, outspoken, | 08:20 |
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| successful at the school. She never got less than ninety-five. | 08:29 |
| Hazy sunset over destroyed buildings | Music | 08:36 |
| Shelled buildings/ People | BORMANN: In a lingering fog of war, it’s impossible for anyone on any side to say how many civilians died in Gaza. The estimates range from a few hundred people to more than one thousand. No other civilian deaths in this conflict have been scrutinised as much | 08:48 |
| Doctor’s house | as the killing of four girls inside this house. The doctor’s three brothers also live here, including Shehab Abuelaish, whose seventeen-year-old daughter Noor, died in the shelling. | 09:07 |
| Blood stained homework pages | He invited me in and took me upstairs to a wrenching scene of chaos and carnage. His account of the attack is confronting and disturbing. | 09:25 |
| Shehab and Bormann in house | SHEHAB ABUELAISH: Aya was here so I told my brother to leave her here. I went to see Mayar. She was sitting here, without a head – it was cut off… and you can see her blood on the wall. We carried her, and put her beside Aya. She was in small pieces. I went to see Noor and I raised up her hand, but she was dead. She was covered with her books and shelves. Her head was missing. I told my brother to leave her where she was, and we put her on a chair here. | 09:34 |
| Vacant block through window | Music | 10:26 |
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| BORMANN: In the days before the shelling, a tank had been positioned right outside the house, but when Dr Abuelaish complained to Israeli officers the vehicle moved on. Military commanders claimed they’d called the doctor to warn of the dangers of staying in his house. | 10:28 |
| Israeli tanks | Within Israel, the doctor’s friends were also concerned about tank activity in his neighbourhood. RABBI YITZCHAK YELLIN: I called him right away and I said, | 10:49 |
| Rabbi. Super: | “Well you’ve got the Israeli Army coming in” and he said “I know, but don’t worry about me because they know who I am.” | 10:59 |
| View of house | BORMANN: Witnesses told us the lethal shells were fired from a tank about fifteen hundred metres away. | 11:06 |
| Damage to doctor’s house | At first military commanders wouldn’t speculate on what happened, while their own investigation was underway. CAPTAIN ELIE ISACSON: [Israel Defense Forces] People were supposed to be killed in this mission and they are Hamas terrorists. | 11:12 |
| Isacson | If you analyse this operation you’ll see that the number of steps we went to, to avoid spilling casualties and any sort of unnecessary risks to civilians in the vicinity, is unprecedented. | 11:28 |
| Bulldozed houses | BORMANN: The misfortune of the Abuelaish family is not unique. Just a few streets away, neighbours have been driven from their homes. House after house is in ruins, shelled or bulldozed by advancing Israeli troops. | 11:38 |
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| CAPTAIN ELIE ISACSON: If that home is used as a weapons store… | 12:01 |
| Isacson | BORMANN: But what if it’s not - and clearly in many situations, time after time, that wasn’t the case. | 12:03 |
| Super: | CAPTAIN ELIE ISACSON: Well what we found in a lot of cases were secondary explosions caused by Hamas… | 12:09 |
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| BORMANN: But what if there was no secondary explosion… | 12:14 |
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| CAPTAIN ELIE ISACSON: There were on many, on many occasion and a lot of the instances of the most destruction, there were secondary explosions caused by the massive amounts of explosives being stored in these buildings. | 12:16 |
| Rabbi Yellin | RABBI YITZCHAK YELLIN: I hope to God it was a Hamas missile, but in truth, the children are dead and that’s what’s…. that’s what’s the problem and if it’s friendly fire, well I chalk it up… I chalk it up to tragic mistakes. | 12:28 |
| Phosphorous bombs on Gaza | BORMANN: So much of what happened here escaped the scrutiny of the outside world. Foreign journalists were kept out of Gaza until the end of the war. But some of the more spectacular events could not go unrecorded, like the use of phosphorous bombs in built up areas. | 12:41 |
| Bormann walks with Jodie Clark through UN compound | JODIE CLARK: You see how the sugar’s turned to toffee. BORMANN: Former Australian soldier Jodie Clarke, runs the United Nations Works Compound, set alight | 13:05 |
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| after she says phosphorous shells rained down. JODIE CLARK: There were eight to nine rounds that landed inside the fence line of the UN compound. BORMANN: And these were phosphorous shells? | 13:15 |
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| JODIE CLARK: These were phosphorous shells, yes. | 13:25 |
| Jodie shows shell damage | So you will see up here on the ceiling one shell has come through the ceiling. There were five vehicles parked in here, which ignited straight away. | 13:27 |
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| BORMANN: Twenty million dollars worth of food aid, medicine and stores were destroyed here. | 13:36 |
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| JODIE CLARK: It’s very difficult to explain. | 13:41 |
| Jodie and Bormann stand amongst rubble | We had told them many times the coordinates of the UN compounds. We spoke to them on the telephone. We told them that they were shelling the UN compound and that the warehouses specifically were being hit and the workshops and the shelling continued. CAPTAIN ELIE ISACSON: They are not munitions experts. | 13:43 |
| Isacson. Super: | As I said we’re looking into certain cases on our own and when the results of those checks have come in, they will be published. | 14:00 |
| Doctor with daughter at hospital |
| 14:07 |
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| BORMANN: His family devastated, Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish keeps a constant vigil at the bedside of his injured daughter Shada. She lost fingers in the shelling but it seems surgery has saved her injured eye. | 14:11 |
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| DR ABUELAISH: You know the doctors today they spoke to me and they told me they were satisfied with the progress and the improvement was unbelievable. | 14:28 |
| Doctor’s house | BORMANN: Israeli commanders have now released their report into the shelling of the doctor’s home. They claim on that day there was Hamas gunfire from a building next door. The military also says suspicious figures were in the doctor’s home using it as a lookout, so an order was made to fire on the house. But Dr Abuelaish maintains only he and his family were home. DR ABUELAISH: It says there were armed people. | 14:38 |
| Doctor. Super: | But my daughters were armed with love, with hope, with education, with work for peace. | 15:08 |
| Rabbi greets doctor | RABBI YELLIN: I would say that his attitude towards facing death and tragedy is the most monumental that I’ve ever come across. | 15:19 |
| Rabbi. Super: | In other words the initial devastation, but to see beyond the moment and Izzeldin grabbed the “beyond the moment” immediately. | 15:34 |
| Rabbi and Doctor outside eye hospital |
| 15:45 |
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| BORMANN: In an unorthodox bond, the Palestinian doctor and the Rabbi are sparing once more. | 15:53 |
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| DR ABUELAISH: Military actions are not useful between people… The solution, to listen to each other and to be serious. | 15:58 |
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| RABBI YELLIN: It’s too complicated. DR ABUELAISH: Oh wow, too complicated, well make it easy. Can you make it easy? OSHRAT KOTLER: Eventually the symbol of the war was this doctor and his great suffering, but they all told me over and over and over again | 16:09 |
| Oshrat | “Where is our suffering? I mean, you are on Israeli television, why don’t you show us?” Of course we show this all the time. | 16:26 |
| Credits | Reporter : Trevor Bormann Camera: Ron Ekkel Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen Research: Nicky Redl and Anut Shwartz | 16:37
16:43 |