Where There Is Hope

"I saw a car that crashed and flipped over; I instantly stopped my car and rushed towards it to provide aid to the wounded. I didn’t care that my life, and the lives of my family members who were with me, could be at risk. I am a doctor and my first priority is providing needed aid."
"I asked the soldiers [IDF personnel who arrived later] for some bandages and help because I wanted to stop the bleeding of the young girl. But the soldiers didn’t want to cooperate with me, because they wanted to wait for the Israeli ambulance."
"And then an Israeli ambulance arrived – I saw a doctor helping in the rescue; she was the first to help, along with her team."
"It wasn’t me who called for an ambulance, whether Red Crescent or the Israeli Magen David Adom, I just rushed to help – it does not matter what nationality, color or anything else. Nobody even thanked me for my help, but I performed my duty, and that is all that matters."
Dr. Ali Shroukh, ath-Thaheriyya, near Hebron

IMEMCNews

Since Dr. Shroukh uttered that observation that he was unthanked for his humanitarian response to a dreadful terrorist attack against Jewish settlers, he has been thanked often and profusely. Later reports on the situation stress that the telephone in his urology clinic in the rural border town of Dahriya has been ringing constantly and many of those calls were from Israeli officials anxious to thank this Palestinian doctor for responding to his inner humanitarian instincts.

No word how his response has played out in his village, but both international and local news media have written about the incident. This happened for Dr. Shroukh on the last day of Ramadan, and with one-day permit in hand, enabling him and his family members to enter Jerusalem to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, he had set off to do just that. The 45-yer-old doctor was driving to Jerusalem with his brothers on a West Bank road on July first.

Suddenly they encountered a car, flipped onto its roof ahead of them. The large vehicle was readily identifiable as that of a Jewish settler, and it had crashed as a result of a Palestinian gunman in another vehicle, having passed it and firing, killed the driver, Rabbi Michael Mark 46, the father of ten children. Two of those children were in the vehicle along with Rabbi Mark's wife who was critically injured, as well as their teenage daughter. They too had been en route to Jerusalem to visit with the Rabbi's mother.

Two other Palestinians were already at the scene of the crash, a man and his wife who had also stopped. The man called out to Dr. Shroukh "There's a wounded girl in my car". While the man was diverting traffic around the crashed vehicle, they awaited the arrival of the ambulance they had called, attempting to comfort the teen-age girl Tehila Mark, with her serious abdomen injury. Dr. Shroukh attended to the girl, compressing the wound with a towel. Her brother had been lightly wounded.

Dr. Shroukh and his brother Mahmoud then turned to the overturned vehicle where Rabbi Mark lay dead. His wife, Chavi, was unconscious with a serious head injury. the doctor and his brother smashed a window to enable them to carry the unconscious 44-year-old woman out of the car. And very soon afterward an Israeli ambulance arrived, taking the injured to hospital. A Palestinian medic who had also arrived advised the Shroukh brothers to leave the attack scene.

On the understandable theory that he could be arrested by Israeli soldiers, suspicious of his actions since he wore nothing that might identify him as a doctor and his clothing was covered in the blood of the victims. With the state of his condition it was even possible, said the Palestinian medic, that Jewish settlers might attack them, fearing they were responsible for the attack and the consequent loss of life.

Three days later, in Otniel, close to where the attack had taken place, and the settlement where the Mark family lived, Rabbi Menachem Kelmanson, 28, was sitting shiva for his uncle; the traditional time of mourning after a death, in Judaism. "Tell him thank you, thank you, from all my heart", said Rabbi Kelmanson, asking about the Palestinian doctor, as he wept in sorrow.

The Mark family and their ten children -- Ynetnews