WITHOUT BORDERS

A Palestinian doctor in Israel treats people on both sides of the conflict.

- BY EYAL PRESS

Lina Qasem Hassan, near her home, in Tamra, Israel. She says her mother imbued her with the belief “that all people are equal and that human pain is universal."

In October, 2023, a few days after Hamas’ attack on Israel, a physician named Lina Qasem Hassan filled her car with medical supplies and drove from her home, in Tamra, a town in northern Israel, to the David Dead Sea Resort and Spa, in Ein Bokek. Tourism was about to nosedive throughout the country, but the resort was busy, scrambling to accommodate hundreds of evacuees who had just arrived from Kibbutz Be'eri, one of the communities near the Gaza Strip which Hamas had struck.

Qasem Hassan, a family-medicine physician, came to help at a clinic that had been set up on the hotel’s grounds. She was soon dressing the wounds of injured people and dispensing pills to evacuees who had fled their homes without their medication. The lobby, she told me recently, resembled a refugee camp, with donated clothes scattered in piles and shell-shocked families walking around aimlessly. Yet some of the new guests acted eerily normal, “taking towels and going to the swimming pool,” Qasem Hassan recalled. “It looked like they didn’t realize what they'd been through.” The clinic stayed open for nearly two weeks. Every day, members of the kibbutz gathered in a banquet hall to hear updates about neighbors who had been kidnapped or murdered or were still missing. Sometimes the names of multiple family members were read aloud. (Ninety-seven civilians were killed at Kibbutz Be'eri on October 7th.) Although Qasem Hassan was accustomed to treating people who had suffered trauma, the experience tested her emotional endurance. “We had to be there to assist people who couldn't stand the situation,” she said.