"I don't know how this man will stand on his feet again after this tragedy," Dr. Liat Lerner-Geya, an Israeli who worked with Aboul Aish, told the Hebrew-language news website Ynet. "He would come to Israel and sleep at friends' houses for three nights. Even though he had all the necessary permits, they always gave him trouble at the crossings. But he believed there should be coexistence and practiced this in his work."
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Israel TV news broadcasts a Gaza father's heartbreak
Dr. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who gave frequent interviews to the Israeli media, was minutes away from giving another when he called anchorman Shlomi Eldar, hysterical with grief.
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After the newscast, Eldar met with reporters. He said the doctor told him that evening "that since his wife's passing, the girls had been his entire life. He said his eldest daughter wanted to study at Haifa University. Just today another one of his daughters had told him she had gotten her period. 'In the middle of a war you get your period. You are a woman now.' "
She and her sisters are dead. The news spread across Israel's websites; the video of the doctor's broadcast quickly made it to YouTube.
Eldar said of Aboul Aish: "It is simply surreal. He is part of this place yet not of it, belonging and not belonging."
Even so, across Israel the doctor's anguished voice kept playing over and over.
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jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com
Sobelman works in The Times' Jerusalem Bureau.
