The Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney, southwest London. When my
son Tom was admitted I imagined how patients must have felt when it was
called the Royal Hospital for Incurables.
It was August 2003, four months since Tom had been shot in the head by an
Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip — four months since we had started trying
to get at the truth of what had happened, running again and again into
obstruction by the Israeli army.
I had a sense that my family was fragmenting, each of us locked into our own
particular nightmare. We had always talked, and we still did, but now there
were no-go areas, things none of us could really bear to discuss. One of
these was what we were going to do about Tom, who had been unconscious since
the shooting.
Though we knew that Tom was never going to recover, we had no real idea of how
long he was likely to continue as he was, or how we were going to deal with
it. We knew there must be a limit to the limbo of his existence, but we
couldn’t yet bear the thought of letting him go.
Three friends who had been at school with Tom at Winchester came to visit him.
When we entered his room he was sitting upright, supported in a wheelchair.
This was almost more disturbing than seeing him lying down. Quite early on,
I’d nearly collapsed on seeing him sitting on a bed wearing a T-shirt and
tracksuit bottoms, supported by two physiotherapists, his unseeing eyes
gazing straight ahead.
Now the boys stood round him. Their shock and sadness were plain. One of them
touched him gently. These were young men who had known Tom when he was
active, funny, challenging, full of life. They’d played football together,
sat in class together, enjoyed loud music. Now they looked down at the wreck
of the person he had once been, and I could see they were remembering. They
were a part of him, and he was a part of them. The relationship was clearly
still there. And yet Tom wasn’t.
The whole family was feeling the weight of his suffering and we were all
responding differently. Sophie, his elder sister, moved away from home to
live in a friend’s flat. Fred, his youngest brother, who had hero-worshipped
him, was quiet and sad and spent a lot of time in Tom’s room. Billy, our
middle son, transformed Fred’s old room to make it more inviting. It tore at
my heart to see how he was trying to take care of Fred.
As October came, and the old trees in the hospital gardens began to lose their
leaves, something intangible told me Tom’s death was approaching, however
slowly.
He had been shot in the town of Rafah, while wearing a fluorescent jacket to
show he was one of a noncombatant group of young volunteers who opposed the
destruction of Palestinian homes. Anthony, Tom’s father, who is a lawyer,
had gathered evidence in an extensive report that was passed to the Israeli
authorities. We believed it showed that Tom had been murdered. Out of the
blue, at the end of October, we heard that the judge advocate-general in
Israel had ordered an investigation. “Quite unprecedented,” said the man
from the Foreign Office.
Anthony and I were both spending more and more time at the hospital. Tom’s
breathing was very shallow and his bones were visible beneath the
translucent skin. Often he jerked his head, his hands clammy, his forehead
damp with sweat. We were all certain that he was in pain.
Anthony and I both believed that, as parents, we had a serious responsibility
to ask that he should not go on suffering. It wasn’t that Tom simply had no
quality of life; it was worse than that, it was a totally negative quality.
The gift of life had come to seem even more precious to me during the past
six months, but I knew Tom’s condition was not life.
At a meeting, Patti Simonson, the hospital social worker, explained to us
that, though consultation with the family was crucial, the decision to allow
Tom to die was not ours to make. Nor did it lie in the hands of the hospital
and primary care team; it rested with the court. Professor Keith Andrews,
the senior doctor and a kindly man with an encouraging manner, asked us:
“What do you think Tom would have wanted?”
I told him of a passage in Tom’s last journal where he described in detail
what had happened to Rachel Corrie, the American protester crushed to death
by an Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) bulldozer in Rafah three weeks before he
was shot. He wrote that with such a maimed body he would not want to
survive. We discussed whether this might constitute a kind of advance
directive.
Everything around me seemed distant and unreal. I was asking whether my child
should be allowed to die. A part of me could not believe this was happening,
and yet I knew that if we asked that Tom should be kept alive it would be
not for him but for us.
I had no idea of the legal complexities that this would involve. First, an
application would have to be made by the primary care trust to the family
division of the High Court to withdraw food and hydration from Tom. Under
British law there could be no merciful injection. Since Tom was breathing on
his own, there was no life-support machine to turn off.
This application would have to be accompanied by a report on his condition
from an independent medical expert and by a witness statement from someone
speaking on Tom’s behalf. If the application was granted, Tom would be moved
to a house in the hospital grounds and we, his family, would be able to live
there with him until he died. We would have to watch him die of thirst.
Anthony looked at Professor Andrews and asked: “How long is this likely to
take?”
“Normally 10 days to two weeks.” We sat gazing at him, unable to speak. “Isn’t
there any other way?” I said finally.
“No, there isn’t. This is where British legislation stands,” he said. He was
clearly a humane man in a painful position. This was a high-profile case,
and the hospital could not afford to put a foot wrong. But the idea that we
had to put Tom through this agonising process seemed barbaric, incredible.
Why could the law not acknowledge that increasing doses of morphine would
probably kill him anyway, and agree that his misery should be ended now? I
tried to imagine what it would be like for Fred — for all of us — to watch
Tom die of dehydration.
All I could say as we left was: “Professor Andrews, if you ever want me to
speak publicly in favour of giving a lethal injection, about the need for
all this to be done differently, then I will.”
Short of taking Tom to a country like Holland or Switzerland, which seemed
unthinkable in his condition, there appeared to be no other way. So the
hospital set wheels in motion, and a week later, in the presence of Anthony
and Sophie, I made a witness statement on Tom’s behalf to a sympathetic
young lawyer, Kiran Bhogal, setting out my belief that it was “not, in the
existing circumstances, in Tom’s best interests for him to be given
life-sustaining medical treatment measures (including ventilation, nutrition
and hydration by artificial means)”.
I strove to give as full and truthful a picture as I could of Tom’s present
state and an interpretation of what his own wishes would have been. “What I
am clear about is this; that this is not what Tom would have wanted,” I
said. “I am trying to meet his wishes even though in my heart I would always
want him to be there. To be mature and rational I need to let Tom go, for
Tom’s sake.”
Anthony, Sophie and I all signed. As we left the solicitor’s office I was
overwhelmed by the weight of what we had just done. I said to Anthony: “I
feel as though I’ve just killed Tom.”
It was horrifying to see the Evening Standard headline a few days later, “Let
the human shield boy die”. The press had got hold of the story, and the
Daily Mail and other national newspapers trumpeted the fact that we were
applying for permission to “turn off Tom’s life-support machine”.
I was devastated. It felt like the grossest intrusion into something deeply
personal, as if my innermost soul had been invaded, and I paced the house at
night, distraught, unable to sleep. Suddenly all our anguish was public
property, the agonising decision we had made reduced to a few crude and
simple sentences.
Soon we began receiving letters from the pro-life lobby. On the whole they
were polite, but I was sickened by their holier-than-thou tone. These were
from people, I was certain, who had never experienced the pain of seeing
their child in Tom’s condition. For whose sake were they asking us to keep
him alive? To me it felt like arrogance. The hospital, too, was unhappy with
this unwanted publicity.
November 27 was a day I had been dreading: Tom’s birthday. He was 22. It was a
family tradition on birthdays and special occasions to have a
hydrogen-filled balloon bearing a special message floating above the kitchen
table, attached to the fruit bowl.
The last time I’d bought a balloon for Tom had been the previous September, on
the day he was going off to university. I’d got one in the shape of an
enormous champagne bottle with the message “Good Luck Tommo” on it. It had
been such a happy day, full of anticipation. We’d all sat down to coffee and
croissants, with Tom — typically — still filling out his university bank
form. Then, etched into my memory, was the picture of Tom and Billy hugging
and hugging as they said goodbye like a couple of young bears, exuberantly
lifting one another off the ground in a rocking motion.
Today, on this saddest of birthdays, I went to the Party Shop, the same shop
I’d been going to for years to buy a balloon for Tom. I chose one in the
shape of a star, with the words: “To dearest Tommo, with all the love we
have. Mum, Dad, Sophie, Billy and Fred.”
Tom was looking extraordinarily peaceful as I tied the balloon to the end of
his bed. Winter sunshine flooded in through the big windows and he lay in a
kind of halo of light. He was so frail now he seemed hardly there.
I wanted Billy and Sophie and Fred to be able to associate Tom’s dying with
some kind of beauty rather than with pain and horror. I thought of lighting
candles, buying lovely flowers. But in the end I knew I would be trying to
make something beautiful out of something bar-baric that should never be
happening. Tom was going to die, one way or another, but our other children
would have to carry on, and I felt deeply concerned about the effect all
this was going to have on them.
On New Year’s Eve the phone rang early. It was the Foreign Office, with news
that an IDF soldier had been arrested for Tom’s shooting. When interrogated,
he had confessed to knowing that Tom was an unarmed civilian. He had not yet
been charged, but the Foreign Office would keep us informed.
Each day now we could see that Tom was growing weaker. He had developed
pneumonia and his breathing was laboured and shallow, however many times his
chest was cleared. The morphine was having less and less effect, and he
shifted restlessly as if in pain. I sensed as I sat beside him that he had
now entered a shadowland, a place nearer to death than to life. Yet the will
to live in his young body was so strong, it still could not surrender. I
could only pray: O God, release my child.
On the first Monday in the new year I asked one of the doctors how much longer
he thought Tom had.
“I don’t think it will be very long now,” he said. I asked what that meant. He
thought carefully and then said: “About a week.”
It had taken so long to reach this point that the calm, precise answer came
like a blow. I longed for Tom to be free of all this horror, but I could not
imagine a world in which I could not see him and touch him. All the
manifestations of his physical being seemed so precious now — the T-shirts
and tracksuits piled up neatly on the shelves, his toothbrush, his shampoo,
the small possessions we had brought with him to the hospital.
I called one of Tom’s inner group of friends and explained that we were close
to losing him. When they visited they stood looking at him in a kind of
loving disbelief, still somehow unable to accept that the Tom they had grown
up with and hung out with could be leaving them in this way.
On January 12, I was sitting with my hand beneath Tom’s arm when I felt a kind
of energy in his body, and something changed in his face, which was
illuminated almost with a look of recognition. Anthony, who was standing by
his bed, saw it too. It was as if, with an enormous effort of will, Tom was
summoning up all the last energy he had to be with us. Though his eyes were
unable to focus, I had the sense that he was looking down at me as I sat in
the chair beside him.
I just kept holding him and repeating: “Look, Tom darling, this is Mum. We’re
here. Mum and Dad are here. We love you very much. You’re doing so well.
Well done, Tom, well done, darling.” And I do believe — perhaps I want to
believe — that at some level there was recognition.
That evening when we got home there was a message from the Foreign Office to
say that the soldier who had been arrested for Tom’s shooting had been
charged with aggravated assault. He was also being charged with obstruction
of justice for shooting Tom and then seeking permission from his commander
to kill him on the grounds that he was carrying a gun. A second soldier was
under arrest for allegedly corroborating his account.
Next day, January 13, was my birthday. I put my face beside Tom’s on the
pillow so that I could hear the beating of his heart, feel the quick rise
and fall of his breathing. How often I had soothed him like this when he was
a small child, unable to sleep. I told him about the soldier, and I promised
him that we would make sure justice was done, that we would hold the army’s
chain of command to account.
Billy came and we went to the canteen where, with great sweetness, he gave me
a card and a birthday present — a little Walkman for me to listen to music
on. It was so typical of him to remember.
By late afternoon I sensed that Tom had reached some turning point, and I knew
that I must tell Father Hubert, our parish priest. Father Hubert was an old
friend. He had known Tom since he was a child, had prayed for him, said
masses for him, though Tom had stopped going to church years ago.
I knew Billy wouldn’t like it — Billy and Sophie had both rejected Catholicism
in their teens — but in my distress it was all I knew how to do. It had
nothing to do with my own faith. I needed the comfort of Father Hubert’s
spiritual presence. Tom, I knew, had been a spiritual person, though not
bound by any creed. I wanted Father Hubert to bless him on his journey, to
help me let him go.
When Father Hubert arrived Billy left the room abruptly. This made me so sad,
but I understood, and I hoped that one day Billy himself would understand.
From his small bag Father Hubert took out a prayer book and in his strong,
quiet voice began the prayers for the departing: “I commend you, my dear
brother, to almighty God, and entrust you to your Creator . . .”
It was dark when he left. I walked with him to the main entrance, and we stood
silently with my hands in his before he disappeared into the night.
I walked back along the quiet corridor and took out my mobile phone. There
were people who needed to know that Tom would not be with us long. I was
just about to make the first call when the phone rang in my hand. It was one
of Tom’s nurses. Almost without hearing what she was saying I fled up the
stairs and along the corridor towards Tom’s room.
The nurses were standing round his bed. I flung my coat on the floor and ran
towards Tom. Someone put a hand on my arm, and I heard someone else say:
“He’s gone.”
Extracted from Defy the Stars by Jocelyn Hurndall, to be published by
Bloomsbury on April 2 at £16.99.
Copies can be ordered for £15.29 including postage from The Sunday Times
BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
A strange meeting in court with the sniper who pulled the trigger
On the morning of May 10, four months after Tom’s death, I stood in the small,
wood-panelled courtroom of IDF southern command near Ashkelon. It was the
first day of the trial of Sergeant Taysir Hayb, a 20-year-old bedouin, who
had shot my son.
Taysir had strong bedouin features, with what appeared to be a scar down one
cheek and another on his forehead. When his leg irons and handcuffs were
removed, he slouched on a chair between his guards. There was none of the
professional formality between them that I would have expected. Occasionally
he and the guards would exchange a remark in Hebrew and even laugh.
I looked at him from my place a few yards away with a strange mixture of
feelings. Here was the man who had shot my son, the evidence indicated, a
sniper taking aim with cool precision through his telescopic sight. Here was
the man who had lied, who, we now knew, had made five conflicting statements
in an effort to save his skin, and had finally attempted to withdraw his
confession.
I thought, too, however, that he was a boy who had been given too much leeway
by his commanding officers, functioning within a culture that seemed to give
out the message that it was acceptable to shoot unarmed civilians in cold
blood — as Tom had been while trying to rescue Palestinian children
trapped by gunfire in Rafah.
As the charges were read out, Taysir looked deeply bored. His entire body
language indicated what a waste of time he thought all this was, and that he
was certain he was going to be cleared. And why should he think otherwise?
The IDF chain of command supported its soldiers, did it not?
The main issue under discussion that day and for weeks afterwards was whether
statements made by Taysir under questioning were admissible as evidence. He
was claiming they had been made under duress.
Much time in court was taken up with the fact that Taysir had previously been
convicted on drugs charges, something the IDF seemed to take more seriously
than killing a civilian.
He appeared pathetic somehow, as if he was incapable of grasping what he’d
done, or the gravity of the situation. Some of the Israeli press had already
dwelt on the fact that he was an Arab, a bedouin — basically one of
Israeli society’s outcasts, as I was beginning to understand —
ie, not “one of them”. They implied that Tom would never have been shot by
an Israeli Jewish soldier, but as far as I was concerned this soldier had
been trained by the IDF, was operating under their rules of engagement and
was their responsibility.
When the commander of Taysir’s regiment was called to the witness box, he
argued that if Tom had been standing where the prosecution claimed he was,
the bullet that shot him could not have come from the watchtower Taysir had
been in. Some houses would have been in the way. The implication was that
the shot had been fired by a Palestinian.
That particular watchtower, we knew, had since been moved by the IDF to
another position after we had been refused permission to view it from the
inside to check for ourselves the line of vision. It soon became clear that
the map the commander produced in court had been out of date even at the
time Tom was shot, which undermined his evidence.
In September I came face to face with Tony Blair at a dinner hosted by the
Arab League ambassadors at the Labour party conference in Brighton.
I had lobbied him for more than a year for assistance in getting justice for
Tom but without success. Now Afif Safieh, the Palestinian delegate in
London, was sitting at the prime minister’s table, and he introduced me to
Cherie Blair, to whom I had also written. When she tapped her husband on the
shoulder he turned and gave me his strong, firm handshake. I came straight
to the point, telling him I was very hurt that he hadn’t yet publicly
condemned the shooting of Tom.
He looked at me with light, glass-blue eyes that couldn’t seem to decide
whether they were looking at me or beyond me, and raised his hands and
shoulders in a helpless gesture. We talked for a few more minutes. Blair
listened attentively, but I found his gaze disorientating because I couldn’t
gauge its focus. Later, as he left the room, he looked back and nodded to
me. No words, but a gesture of acknowledgment.
In December Taysir took the stand. The judges did their best to get him to
open up about what had actually happened, but he kept returning to what he
had reported had happened, almost as if he couldn’t tell the difference.
What was clear was that Taysir was trying to emphasise that he had only been
doing what was expected of him.
On June 27, 2005, he was convicted of manslaughter, obstruction of justice,
submitting false testimony, obtaining false testimony and unbecoming
behaviour. He was sentenced to eight years in jail. As he was led from the
court he tried to break loose from his guards and lashed out in fury at the
crowd of foreign journalists — there were very few Israeli journalists
in court.
The inquest into Tom’s death was finally held in London, at St Pancras
coroner’s court, in April last year. The Israeli authorities had refused to
allow the Metropolitan police to travel to the site of the shooting or to
release vital documents for the coroner’s investigation directly to him.
They also refused to attend the inquest.
The jury concluded: “We the jury unanimously agree that Mr Thomas Peter
Hurndall was shot in Rafah in Gaza between 3.30pm and 4.30pm on 11.4.2003.
He was shot intentionally with the intention to kill him. The jury would
like to express their dismay at the lack of cooperation from the Israeli
authorities during this investigation.”
