More than eight years after Israeli tank fire sundered his family forever, a Palestinian medical doctor now living in Toronto will finally have his day in court.

“It’s time for Israel to take responsibility and apologize,” Izzeldin Abuelaish told the Star in an interview.

A celebrated advocate for peace, Abuelaish, 61, has spent nearly a decade trying to right at least a few of the wrongs committed in a terrible war, the three-week Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip that began on Dec. 27, 2008, and ended on Jan. 18, 2009.

Known to Israelis as Operation Cast Lead, the invasion sought to punish Palestinians for almost daily rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel. The operation claimed more than 1,400 Palestinian lives, many of them civilians, including three of Abuelaish’s daughters and a niece. Thirteen Israelis also died.

Soon, if all goes according to plan, Abuelaish will finally have a chance to offer his testimony in a courthouse in the Israeli city of Beersheba, where he will back up his claims against the Israeli state.

He seeks a formal apology from Israel as well as financial compensation.

The doctor’s testimony is scheduled to be heard on March 15, more than six years after he launched a lawsuit against the Israeli Defense Ministry, an action he was forced to take when Israel refused to apologize or pay damages voluntarily.

“Despite the severe outcome, from a legal standpoint our stance is that the operation during which Dr. Abuelaish’s family members were hurt (sic) was an operation of war,” Ahaz Ben-Ari, then legal adviser to the Israeli Defense Ministry, said at the time. “Therefore the State of Israel does not carry the responsibility for the damage it caused.”

Israel’s position has remained unchanged since then.

For the gynecologist and his family, the worst moments of the conflict unreeled during its waning hours, in the late afternoon of Jan. 16, when a pair of shells fired by an Israeli tank blasted through a wall of their residence in northern Gaza, killing three of Abuelaish’s daughters — Bassan, 20, Mayar, 15, and Aya, 13 — as well as his 14-year-old niece, named Nour.

Another daughter — Shatha, then 16 — lost sight in one eye during the attack. Another niece — Ghaida, then 14 — was permanently disabled.

Their deaths attracted international attention at once, partly because of Abuelaish’s prominence as a champion of peace in the region and partly because the doctor immediately got on the phone to Israeli TV journalist Shlomi Eldar. Abuelaish’s frantic pleas for help were broadcast live on Israeli TV and soon went global via various Internet websites.

In a paradox that seems quintessentially Middle Eastern, the doctor’s wounded daughter and niece, both victims of the Israeli attack, were soon receiving state-of-the-art medical treatment at a hospital near Tel Aviv.

His wife, Nadia, was not obliged to endure those terrors. She died of leukemia about four months before the Israeli attack.

Soon after the tragedy, Abuelaish and his surviving family, including three daughters and two sons, traded Gaza for Toronto, where the doctor accepted a standing offer to work as a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, a post he still holds.

“I have made many mistakes in life,” he told the Star, “but I am proud of my decision to come to the University of Toronto.”

His two eldest living daughters, Dalal and Shatha, recently graduated from the U of T’s engineering school — a mostly male bastion of learning — and now hold down good jobs in their fields. His younger children are also doing well.

Following his daughters’ deaths, Abuelaish wrote a book about his life and his family’s losses entitled I Shall Not Hate. He has continued to promote the cause of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

He attributes the slow progress of his lawsuit to “bureaucracy,” but his lawyer in Israel says other factors may be at work.

“The Israeli legal system is not efficient when it deals with Palestinians,” Hussein Abu Hussein wrote in an email to the Star. “There are endless hindrances they put in front of them.”

In order to launch his lawsuit, Abuelaish was required to post a bond of 20,000 new Israeli shekels for each of his daughters and his niece. That is equivalent to about $28,000 in total.

Abu Hussein said a ruling might be issued by the end of this year, but it could be appealed by either side, leading to several more years of litigation.

Meanwhile, Abuelaish has set up a foundation in memory of his daughters and niece, called Daughters for Life. He intends to use any financial compensation from Israel to further the foundation’s goals, which include eventually building schools for young women in the Middle East, as well as a school for First Nations women in Canada.

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He has not set a fixed amount of compensation he seeks from Israel, content to leave that up to the Israeli courts. Still, he was heartened last year when Israel agreed to pay a reported $20 million (U.S.) in compensation for the 10 lives lost in a 2010 Israeli attack on a Turkish vessel, the Mavi Marmara, that was carrying human-rights activists to Gaza. Israel also formally apologized to Turkey for the incident.

Abuelaish sees that development as a possible precedent for his case.

“I will never give up,” he told the Star. “I will never forget my daughters. I am living for them.”

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