A Message Of Hope

Izzeldin Abuelaish: 'Let my daughters be the last to die'

Posted: May 01, 2010, 2:00 PM by NP Editor

On the very day of the Gaza shelling that ended my three daughters’ lives in January, 2009, we had decided, as a family, that I would take up the professional posting in Toronto that had been offered to me by Dr. Peter Singer and Dr. Abdullah Daar, and that I would come to work as a professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Toronto has turned out to be everything I’d hoped for: a place and a time for my surviving children to heal. Dalal and Shatha are enrolled at the University of Toronto. Mohammed, Raffah and Abdullah are in a junior school nearby. The neighbours welcomed us to the street and soon enough we found our way. In our first days in the new house, an incident warmed my heart. Most of the backyards around the neighbourhood are fenced. The family next door has children about the same ages as my younger ones, and the first thing they did after we moved in was to take down a section of the fence so the kids could run back and forth without barriers. That simple act gave me a lot to think about. Tragedy cannot be the end of our lives. We cannot allow it to control and defeat us.

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