Izzeldin Abuelaish
Lost three daughters to a tank shell in Gaza and chose, on live television, not to hate
Izzeldin Abuelaish was born in 1955 in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, the eldest of nine children in a family that had lost its land in 1948. He won a scholarship to study medicine in Cairo, and trained further in obstetrics in London and public health at Harvard. From the late 1990s he worked as a fertility specialist at Soroka hospital in Beersheba, one of very few Palestinian doctors on staff at an Israeli hospital.
His wife Nadia died of leukaemia in September 2008, leaving him with eight children. Four months later, during the war of that winter, he was at home in Jabalia with the family, giving regular telephone reports to Israeli television about conditions in Gaza. On 16 January 2009 two Israeli tank shells struck the house. His daughters Bessan, Mayar and Aya and his niece Noor were killed, and another daughter badly hurt. Minutes later he telephoned the news anchor Shlomi Eldar, who was live on air, and Israeli viewers heard him screaming for help.
He refused to turn it into a call for revenge. The book he wrote, I Shall Not Hate, argued that hatred was a disease and that his daughters' deaths must be the last. He moved to Toronto to teach, founded the Daughters for Life Foundation to give scholarships to young women from across the Middle East, and pursued a long, unsuccessful legal case seeking an Israeli apology. He is a professor at the University of Toronto.