When Hamas unleashed its assault on hundreds of Jews attending a track pageant in southern Israel previous this month, an Israeli Arab paramedic insisted on staying on the scene to check out to avoid wasting lives.
In the tip, he gave his personal.
Awad Darawshe was once 23, unmarried, good-looking — however he wasn’t on the Tribe of Nova pageant to bounce. He labored for Yossi Ambulances and was once amongst a workforce of paramedics assigned to paintings the pageant in a tent at the web site’s outer edge.
He was once killed when Hamas militants slipped undetected into Israel from the Gaza Strip and butchered their method in the course of the pageant crowd and into within reach villages, settlements and kibbutzim.
Shortly after crack of dawn on Oct. 7, rockets pierced the skies. Grenades went off. Gunfire ricocheted in every single place. Injured, bleeding revelers raced to the paramedics’ station. But the chaos temporarily escalated. As the scope of the Hamas assault turned into transparent, the station’s chief ordered the paramedics to evacuate.
Darawshe refused to depart. He was once shot to demise whilst bandaging probably the most injured.
Days later, after his frame was once recognized, the surviving paramedics informed Darawshe’s circle of relatives why he had selected to stick. He felt that, as an Arab, he may in some way mediate with the attackers.
“He said, ‘No, I’m not leaving. I speak Arabic, I think I can manage,’” mentioned his cousin, Mohammad Darawshe, who spoke to The Associated Press by phone from his house in northern Israel.
That fateful resolution has left the Darawshe circle of relatives reeling with sorrow, their simplest convenience the bravery of Awad’s movements.
“He brought us a lot of pain, he brought us a lot of agony, he brought us a lot of sorrow,” his cousin said. “But he also brought us a lot of pride — because he chose to stay with his mission until the last moment.”
A funeral was held Friday in Iksal, a small Arab-majority village about 3 miles (5 kilometers) southeast of Nazareth. Several thousand mourners attended.
The Darawshe family has lived in Iksal for generations. They are part of Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority that makes up about 20% of the population. They are the descendants of Palestinians who stayed in the country after the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Unlike Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, they are full citizens of Israel, but they face widespread discrimination. Tensions between them and Jewish Israelis flare repeatedly, particularly in times of war.
The festival attack left at least 260 Israelis dead and an undetermined number were taken hostage. In Saturday’s brutal attack by Hamas, more than 1,300 Israelis were killed altogether, the worst massacre in the country’s history. Israel declared war on Hamas the following day. As of Sunday, the conflict has also left more than 2,300 Palestinians dead and the Middle East on the precipice of a wider conflagration.
Darawshe’s death was confirmed by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in social media posts, which said Hamas not only killed Darawshe but stole his ambulance and drove it to Gaza.
“A hero,” the Foreign Ministry said of Darawshe. “May his memory be a blessing.”
Mohammad Darawshe is the director of strategy at the Givat Haviva Center for Shared Society, an organization that works to bridge the gap between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens — the ethos of the Darawshe family for which Awad made the ultimate sacrifice.
“We are very proud of his actions,” Mohammad Darawshe said. “This is what we would expect from him and what we expect from everyone in our family — to be human, to stay human and to die human.”
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Sampson reported from Atlanta.