To understand my dad, I needed to learn about the day he was shot

My father, Anthony Shadid, was shot while reporting on the second Intifada. I went on a journey to meet the man who saved his life.

“Shoulders!” I begged. “Shoulders! Shoulders!”

As a child, I loved to ride on my father’s shoulders. Sitting up there, I rubbed the bald spot on his head. “From seeing too much,” he explained of the hair loss.

Then, I poked at the small crater the size of my thumb just above his right shoulder.

“Daddy, tell me the story again,” I asked, “of how you were shot.”

Later, I would retell the story to every elementary school friend – and stranger – who would listen.

The story was set in March 2002 on a street in Ramallah that I couldn’t quite picture. My father was there reporting for The Boston Globe on the beginning of the Israeli army’s monthlong siege on then-Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s compound. I was 10 months old and safe at home with my mother in the United States, oblivious to the danger my father faced.

It was the height of the second Intifada (2000-05), the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that had erupted after then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, following the collapse of the Oslo Accords and, with it, promises of a Palestinian state.

This period of violence saw 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis killed. It was, my father had written in The Globe, a “far dirtier war” than the first Intifada (1987-93). And he would soon bear the scars of it.

“Tell me more,” I gasped.

His hand bopped to the cadence of his narration, just as it did whenever he told a story.

“When I fell to the ground,” he said as he lifted me off his shoulders, “I didn’t know where I was shot.”

I hoped to learn more about this story when I was older and had found the right questions to ask. But I never got that chance.

In 2012, while on assignment for The New York Times in Syria, my father, Anthony Shadid, died of an asthma attack. He was 43 years old.

The questions I didn’t know to ask

I was 10 and at home in the US with my mother, who was by now amicably divorced from my father. He’d been due back from his weeklong assignment that day, and I’d been due to speak to him on Skype. But I hadn’t been able to reach him. When my mother walked in that evening, her face told me my worst fear had come true.

“Did Daddy die?” I asked her.

The keffiyeh made no difference. The closer they got to the border the shorter my father’s breaths became.

Now that he was gone, I had questions I feared would remain unanswered. Many of them centred around that day in March 2002, when my father found himself lying beneath a cemetery grey sky on a near-empty Ramallah street.

Last year, 11 years after his death, I went in search of the answers; and the man who had accompanied my father that day, the man who had saved his life.

In August, I moved to Bethlehem to teach English. There, in Palestine, the place where I believed my father had had his first brush with death, I felt closer to him. I searched The Boston Globe archives for the full name of the man who was with him when he was shot – Said al-Ghazali. I hoped Said would be able to answer some of the questions I had about that day and wondered if he’d answer one I was scared to ask: had my father chosen his work over his life and, by extension, over me?

Said was easy to find on Facebook. We had mutual connections through friends of my father’s. I sent a message and waited nervously for his response. It came just a few hours later, as an invitation to his home in Jerusalem.

A week later, as I took a bus from Checkpoint 300 to the Old City and another from there to the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Wadi Quddum, I wondered if Said would add colour to the scene my father had outlined for me all those years ago.

Now 69 and retired, Said greeted me warmly at the bus stop before leading me down the street, past bike-riding children and smoking teenagers, to his home on the fourth floor of an apartment complex where each generation of his family occupies a different level. Inside, his wife, Sanaa, served us a meal of grainless bread and roasted turkey.

“So, you want to know about your dad,” Said said, as he leaned back in his chair.

Said retired from a 38-year career in journalism in 2021. He’d worked as a stringer and journalist for international outlets and helped foreign journalists with everything from Arabic translation to transport and joint reporting.

He’d faced many dangerous situations during his career, but the trip he took with my father during the second Intifada was his “closest call”, he told me.

They had planned to travel from Jerusalem to Ramallah to report on the siege of Arafat’s compound.