Gary Younge’s tunnel vision

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
27 April '11

Children’s hospital wards are often quite noisy places with sick babies crying, attending mothers chatting, toddlers playing and visitors constantly arriving and leaving. So in the early hours of the afternoon of April 6th 1994, I didn’t actually hear the explosion. It was only the third or fourth consecutive wailing ambulance siren which distracted my attention from the I.V. line I was setting up at the time and activated that all-enveloping sixth sense that something, even in a busy hospital like HaEmek in Afula, was very wrong.

Seconds later the ward’s head nurse put her head around the door. She only needed to say one word – pigu’a – which means terror attack in Hebrew. That word activates an entire system. A skeleton staff remains on the wards whilst the rest of us report to pre-determined places and take up our pre-assigned and well-drilled roles. That day was the first time in my professional life that I witnessed the immediate aftermath of what later turned out to be the first car bomb detonated inside pre-1967 Israel.

Seven gas cylinders, five hand-grenades, 1,100 carpentry nails and the fuel in the tank of the car itself combined to rip through the metal and glass of the number 348 bus whilst it stood at the bus-stop in central Afula with passengers boarding, including many teenagers who had just got out of school for the day. Eight people were killed and forty wounded. For months afterwards I used to see some of the wounded teenagers coming almost daily to the hospital for further treatment, mostly for the severe burns they had sustained.

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