A historian of Gaza’s only Christian hospital, where scores died in an explosion this week, shares the story of the longstanding refuge.
Update (October 19, 2023): This story has been updated to include newly available information from a US intelligence assessment.
The Arabic word ahli can be translated into English in several ways: family, membership, and people. This family is not limited to nuclear family membership. It’s capacious, expanding to include a wide range of people who belong together.
This word, ahli, has appeared in news headlines across the world this week, following the explosion that killed scores seeking refuge at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
Narratives about who was to blame proliferated before the fires at the hospital were even extinguished. Some claimed an Israeli air strike was resonsible. Others blamed a misfired rocket belonging to Palestine Islamic Jihad. A US intelligence assessment, viewed by outlets including CNN on Wednesday, judged “that Israel was not responsible for [the] explosion that killed hundreds of civilians,” estimated the death toll at the “low end of the 100-to-300 spectrum,” and reported “only light structural damage at the hospital.”
As a historian who has published on al-Ahli Hospital, let me extend an invitation to pause while media debate and intelligence fact-finding continue. Let’s pause to learn. To think. To pray.
Praying about the destruction at this hospital in Gaza needs to start, first and foremost, with knowledge of the people who were affected. Who were the people at the hospital? Why did al-Ahli Arab Hospital experience this tragedy? And how can we turn to God when nothing makes sense?
To more fully comprehend who sought refuge within the hospital, we must start with its history.
The idea of establishing a Christian hospital in Gaza began in 1878, …