Doctors Without Borders

“This is how Dr. Yuval Bitton remembers the morning of Oct. 7. Being jolted awake just after sunrise by the insistent ringing of his phone. The frantic voice of his daughter, who was traveling abroad, asking, ‘Dad, what’s happened in Israel? Turn on the TV.’ … Even in that first moment, Dr. Bitton says, he knew with certainty who had masterminded the attack: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and Inmate No. 7333335 in the Israeli prison system from 1989 until his release in a prisoner swap in 2011. But that was not all. Dr. Bitton had a history with Yahya Sinwar. As he watched the images of terror and death flicker across his screen, he was tormented by a decision he had made nearly two decades before — how, working in a prison infirmary, he had come to the aid of a mysteriously and desperately ill Mr. Sinwar, and how afterward the Hamas leader had told him that ‘he owed me his life.'” All the connections and histories associated with the Middle East crisis can’t possibly be narrowed down to one book, one article, one placard, or certainly not one social media post. In the NYT (Gift Article) Jo Becker and Adam Sella piece together one (of a million) defining moments in this endlessly painful saga; history’s open wound that infects the world and never seems to heal. The Hamas Chief and the Israeli Who Saved His Life.

+ And an interview with Bitton in Haaretz: “He sees himself as playing a central role in the realization of the Islamist ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood. He thinks he has entered the annals of history. And he really doesn’t care if 200,000 people are killed and not a single house remains complete in Gaza. The main thing is the goal, the greater idea.”