Dear Dr Adnan al-Bursh,
Your hands have lived with me for months. After Israel tortured you to death, I searched for them in every photo or video they showed of you. I glimpsed one photo of you that your children and wife were looking at on their phone as they grieve. Your arms greet the camera and they are outstretched. Your hands offer the camera an even larger smile than your mouth.
I find your hands amidst a tangle of doctors’ wrung-out bodies in a photo taken in the staff room at al-Shifa Hospital at some point in the early weeks of Israel’s onslaught following October 7. Most of the other hands are preoccupied: your colleagues are manipulating their phones, one is laughing and grasping the back of his neck, one is vaping, one is caught at a moment of his fingers’ gesticulations. But your hands are still. Each forms a soft ball: one rests on a mattress, the other props up your head. Exhaustion seems about to pull you into sleep.
It reminds me of the photo that a friend took of you during the Great March of Return in May 2018, on the day that the US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and Israel’s viciousness intensified even further. You had operated on 28 patients. In the photo, which went viral, you are sitting and you are asleep and your hands are clasped with the left hand in a loose fist. They pull the viewer’s gaze downwards towards the fat braid of heavy chestnut brown-red blood that is drying in your tired lap and on your light blue scrubs. I look at this spontaneous gesture which turns your hand into a ridged fruit in moments of slackening consciousness. I wonder whether your surgeon’s hand grasps within itself muscular memories of the previous hours and days. I wonder if this is how you fell asleep as a child.
In a video I saw after Israel murdered you, both of your hands are holding a pick. You are one of several doctors in turquoise scrubs digging a mass grave in the grounds of al-Shifa for all those whom Israel killed during that particular siege. In another video, a commemorative montage, I follow your left hand shown in close-up as it touches a banister lightly – once, twice – as you walk down some stairs. You are younger and the film seems to have been taken at a time of no immediate or obvious horror. I think of you touching different kinds of wood. I think of how the surgeon’s craft is commonly described as a relation of hand and tool.
When I teach medical humanities courses, I teach historical material addressing the importance of the surgeon’s hand. Surgeons have written of how the hand’s acts convey intellect and character, of how the hand is the instrument of sensibility and expression. One artist, after observing surgeons at work in Britain in the 1940s wrote about the special grace of both mind and body that issues from those coordinating to save a life.[*]
But the orthodox canon of medical humanities literature in the west does not contain the hands of a surgeon like you. Your hands whose grace emerged from a body whose thigh bone Israel broke during the first intifada. Your hands that went on, till the very end, repairing the bones that you told us Israel always breaks.[†] Your hands which you were forced to use to crack hard soil for graves during the day while still needing to use them to tend to the living all night. Your hands that coordinated with others to save a life not only by joining with hands of other surgeons but with the small hands of children whom Israel has harmed.
’m thinking again of that photograph in which your hands construct a circuit of improvised care. A girl is lying injured on a hospital trolley and her forehead has been bandaged and she is extending her left hand to hold and stabilize the right wrist of a toddler (her sibling? her child?) at exactly the right pressure to allow your right hand on the other side of the toddler’s wrist to work to adjust a bandage on the toddler’s right hand while the toddler’s left arm, already encased in plaster, is extended out towards us on the second hospital trolley and the toddler’s palm is half open and above the toddler’s encased arm your left hand is just touching, so carefully, the toddler’s chest.[‡]
When Sky News covered how Israel had killed you, they showed the last images we have of you, taken in Al-Awda Hospital on the day before you were abducted. The news channel shines a spotlight on you. You are wearing an all-red jacket with a white line that runs across your chest. In the first still your hands cannot be found: your body masks your left hand and your tired pocket swallows your right. In the next, you are standing with a group of colleagues. So close to your own feet and resting on the floor we see the feet and ankles of a supine patient. The right foot appears to be stabilized with an external fixator. Though your mouth is closed, we know you are talking because each hand is in motion. One is palm down; the other, below it, palm up. Maybe you are modelling something to your colleagues. Maybe you are giving instructions.
The news channel then cuts to your colleague Dr Mohammed Obeid who recounts how Israel’s occupation forces told the hospital’s medical director they would kill everyone in Al-Awda if the men did not come out. He is forced to relive the moment that the Israeli forces violently abducted you. The left hand of the orthopaedic surgeon then moves to his face and, his thumb and fingers now splayed, he rubs his eyes slowly, several times. It is as though he is massaging clay. Then it is too much; his hand half flicks towards the camera and he walks away from the camera’s eye.
Israel abducted Dr Obeid some time after 25 October 2024. I can find no news of where or how he is.
If there have to be last images that have captured your hands it seems right that in one of the them your hands are blurred. Their rhythm does not fit the camera. They are in flight. They break the frame in which they have been placed.
In deep grief,
Felicity Callard
Felicity Callard is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Glasgow whose writingsf focus, amongst other things, on the labours of clinicians and of patients in cultural/historical geography and in medical humanities.
[*] Norman Capener, ‘The hand in surgery’, The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, 1956; Barbara Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, 1952.
[†] Medical Aid for Palestinians, Meet Our Gaza Limb Reconstruction Team: Adnan Al Borsh, 19 August 2016; Ali Abusheik, Anatomy of a viral photo, We Are Not Numbers, May 13, 2019.
[‡] Fadel Naim, Heartbreaking news: My friend and colleague Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, head of the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital, was killed by the Israeli army after being abducted and tortured to the brink of death !, Post on X, May 2, 2024.