"He risked all for others": Tom Hurndall's
mother remembers her son Emily
Sheffield, The Scotsman, 21 July 2003
Tom visiting the pyramids in
Cairo, Egypt. (Kay
Fernandes)
On Friday 11 April,
my eldest son, a photojournalist, was shot in the head by an
Israeli soldier. He was trying to protect two young girls in
the Israelis' line of fire in Gaza. He is 21 and now lies in a
coma, with severe brain damage. We know he is not expected to
recover and our family are endeavouring to come to terms with
this. Recently, we were able to fly him home from Israel and
he is now in The Royal Free in Hampstead, in a room
overlooking London, filled with photographs of his life. Two
large sheets covered in wonderful written messages from
friends hang on the walls.
I was at work when I first
heard Tom had been seriously wounded. I'm head of learning
support at the Argyle primary school in Camden. My daughter,
Sophie, phoned: a news reporter had called her to ask if she
had been told about her brother. We hadn't appreciated that
Tom had gone down to Rafah in the Gaza Strip that week - we
thought he was in a refugee camp in Jordan.
I went into
shock. The first thing I did was to call Tom's father,
Anthony, a lawyer, who was in Russia on business. We decided
he would fly to Israel the next day with Billy, our second
son, as Tom had been airlifted to Seroka hospital in Be'er
Sheva.
I followed on the Monday and shortly after that
Sophie, 23, and my youngest son, 12-year-old Freddy, arrived.
We were expecting the worst. The surgeon had told us Tom might
not survive even a few days and that there was shrapnel still
lodged in his brain. When I first saw him, there was a young
Israeli girl beside his bed who kept repeating, "I am so sorry
for my country". Tom's head was bandaged up and there were
tubes and monitors everywhere. Tom was a vital young man who
had been so full of life.
As a child, he was very
popular at his school. He always threw himself into things and
when he was a teenager, he jumped into the sea in Cornwall to
swim with seal pups, oblivious to their angry mother. He has
always been highly intelligent, articulate and inquisitive,
constantly asking questions, and it seems an awful waste that
his adventurous spirit has led to this.
Tom was
studying photography at Manchester Metropolitan University and
had travelled to Baghdad in February with some British "human
shields" for an assignment. He wanted to be a photojournalist.
We had tried to persuade him not to go but he was insistent,
saying he had done extensive research. From Baghdad he moved
to Jordan and while he was in a refugee camp, he hooked up
with a Palestinian peace group, the International Solidarity
Movement. He agreed to accompany them to Rafah, a town on the
southern end of the Gaza Strip caught between the Israeli army
and Palestinian fighters.
Soon after arriving, he saw a
little boy shot in the shoulder, which profoundly affected
him. He was also shot at, gassed and hit by falling debris. A
few days before he was shot, he wrote in his journal: "The
certainty is that they are watching and it is on the decision
of any one Israeli soldier or settler that my life
depends."
A week later, the activists were peacefully
trying to stop an Israeli tank from blocking access to a local
mosque when Tom saw soldiers in a watchtower open fire.
Numerous shots were directed at a group of children playing in
the rubble nearby. He pulled one five-year-old Palestinian boy
to safety, then returned to save two little girls. As he
reached out to grab their hands, Tom was hit in the head by
the sniper fire. He was wearing a fluorescent orange flak
jacket demonstrating that he was a civilian.
This was
typical of Tom, to put another's safety before his own, to
help the underdog. Only two months before he left for
Palestine, he had squared up to a mugger trying to steal a
mobile phone from a young boy near our home. It used to worry
me that his feelings for others would override any care for
his own safety. He had such an empathetic side and would
always listen when someone was in trouble.
Tom wanted
to experience everything; he threw himself at life. He had
gone to Israel to see a world outside his own. He kept a
beautifully written journal of his travels. It was found in
his knapsack after he was shot. We value it greatly. He wanted
to understand and feel at first-hand what civilians were
suffering in Palestine. He wanted to find the truth behind the
propaganda, seek out injustices.
Tom is the third
Westerner to have been wounded or killed in Gaza in recent
months. In March, a 23-year-old American student, Rachel
Corrie, was crushed to death in Rafah by an Israeli armoured
bulldozer while she tried to protect a Palestinian family home
from being flattened. We have detailed evidence and are sure
now that the Israeli army has deliberately been targeting
foreigners who go into the occupied territories to help
protect Palestinians and to witness and record the conditions
there.
Very soon after arriving in Israel, Anthony and
I went with a military attach/ from the British embassy to the
spot where he was shot. We met the activists he had made
friends with and the mother of the child he had saved. I was
still in terrible shock. Everything seemed unreal. I was
taking information in but not processing it. Fortunately,
Anthony had switched into lawyer mode and was asking hundreds
of questions. We had to seek justice for Tom and it has helped
us to deal with our grief and given us a focus. We returned to
Rafah several times and were once even shot at in the same
place as Tom. This was despite the Israeli soldiers having
been warned three times of our approach, in a clearly marked
British embassy Range Rover.
The Israeli government has
consistently denied shooting Tom with intent, first claiming
that he had been carrying a gun, which is untrue, then saying
he had been near a man carrying a gun. This is also untrue -
the family has collected 14 witness statements to the
contrary. Ten weeks later, we are still fighting for an
official inquiry. We want the officer who fired the gun and
those in high command brought to justice.
Tom was in
intensive care in Israel for four weeks. So many people came
to support us. Many of the activists would sleep at the
hospital at night. One human rights lawyer even lent us his
flat. On 29 May the hospital said we could risk bringing Tom
home - we wanted all his friends to be able to see him. The
horrific reality of Tom's condition hit me as we followed his
ambulance to the airport in Tel Aviv. It felt as if this was
the end of Tom's journey. It's a moment I will never
forget.
I've only recently stopped being in a state of
intense shock; now it is more a feeling of gradual loss. We
are gradually returning to some kind of normality; we are all
back at work and Freddy is at school. Billy stayed out in
Israel, documenting footage of the soldiers'
behaviour.
We recently met up with Jack Straw. We
sought legal advice in order to find out how the government
was obliged to support us. If we produce enough evidence to
prove there was injustice - and we have done that now - they
are obliged to investigate. We are hoping to publish a book of
Tom's journals and photographs soon. The BBC correspondent
Rageh Omar read from his journals at a recent concert we held
to raise funds for our campaign.
We've had talks about
Tom's quality of life; we know he wouldn't want to be hooked
up to a machine. But for now we will play a waiting game, let
nature take its course and ensure that each of us has time
with Tom on our own, to give him comfort and support and to
feel close to him.
At first, whenever we saw the
slightest movement, it was easy for us to imagine he was more
cognisant than he actually is. In reality, these are reflex
movements and we now know there is no chance of
recovery.
I'm intensely proud of Tom. He taught himself
to have courage; he saved a life. We can't all remain in safe
little cages. Tom went to Gaza to expose the injustice. I
profoundly respect the fact that he sought to make a
difference. Somewhere along the line he decided to value life,
not just his own, but those around him.
www.tomhurndall.co.uk (click to
visit)
These past months
have naturally been a life-changing experience but we will not
be in a permanent state of sadness. Tom understood that we are
not here just to live for ourselves. He may be my son but what
he has done is inspirational.
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