A Father Searches for His Son
The night before his class trip, five-year-old Milad Salama was filled with excitement. His father, Abed Salama, took him through the crowded streets of their neighborhood, Anata, to buy treats for the picnic. The area where they lived was a dense urban space encircled by a twenty-six-foot-tall concrete separation wall. This environment was a stark contrast to the rural, open landscape Abed remembered from his own youth. The next morning, Milad dressed in his school uniform, ate a traditional breakfast, and happily boarded a white school van.
As the morning progressed, a heavy rainstorm moved in. Abed was off from his job at the Israeli phone company when he heard troubling news from a relative. A school bus had been involved in a major accident near a local military checkpoint. Panic set in as Abed realized he had almost prevented Milad from going, having forgotten to pay the trip fee until the last moment. He rushed toward the accident site, passing through a landscape defined by Israeli settlements and military zones that had squeezed his community into a small fraction of its original size.
Upon reaching the scene, Abed found a chaotic and horrifying sight. A school bus lay on its side as a burned-out shell. There were no children or ambulances left at the site, only a crowd of distraught parents and bystanders. Because Abed held a West Bank identification card, his movement was restricted, making it impossible for him to enter Jerusalem to check the hospitals there. He eventually secured a ride from two strangers to a medical center in Ramallah, where he encountered a scene of total desperation and began to fear the worst for his son.
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