Son Climbs Hospital Wall to Sit With His Dying Mother in COVID Ward

Originally published 2020-07-22.

In July 2020, a Palestinian man named Jihad Al-Suwaiti climbed up the outside wall of a hospital in the Hebron area of the occupied West Bank so that he could sit at the window of his mother's isolation room. His mother, Rasmi Suwaiti, 73, had COVID-19 and was dying. Hospital rules meant he could not visit her bedside, so, according to the family's account, he went up to the window ledge every evening for five nights and kept watch from outside the glass until she died on 16 July.

A photo of him perched on the ledge spread around the world after Mohamad Safa, a human rights activist who represented a non-governmental organisation at the United Nations, shared it on Twitter. For many people it became one of the defining images of a pandemic that kept families apart at the moment they most needed to be together.

The son of a Palestinian woman who was infected with COVID-19 climbed up to her hospital room to sit and see his mother every night until she passed away. pic.twitter.com/31wCCNYPbs

— Mohamad Safa (@mhdksafa) July 18, 2020

What happened at the hospital

Jihad, who was 30 at the time, told the news site Arabic Post that his mother had been frightened of the virus and that the family had tried to protect her. Even so, she caught it. At first it looked like a mild illness, and then it worsened. In his words: She began showing symptoms of a slight flu … but the symptoms began to gradually intensify, so I brought her to the hospital.

Once she was admitted to the COVID-19 isolation ward, visits were out of the question. Rather than wait at home for news, Jihad found a way to see her. Each night he climbed to the ledge outside her room and stayed there, watching over her through the window. He was with her in that way when she died.

The photo shows him in the dark, crouched on a narrow sill high on the building, looking into a lit room. It is not a staged or dramatic picture. Its force comes from how ordinary the impulse is: a son who wanted his mother to see a familiar face.

A family already facing serious illness

According to the family, Rasmi had been living with leukaemia before she was diagnosed with COVID-19. Blood cancers and their treatments weaken the immune system, and doctors regarded people with active cancer as among those at highest risk of severe illness from the virus, especially older patients. Her age and her existing illness together made the infection far more dangerous for her than for a healthy younger adult.

Reports at the time also said that one of her other sons was a nurse working on the COVID-19 wards of the same hospital. That detail is a reminder that health workers were living through the pandemic as relatives too, caring for strangers while their own families fell ill. These personal details come from interviews the family gave in July 2020 and have not been independently confirmed by medical records.

Hebron and the West Bank's summer wave

The timing matters. The West Bank had kept case numbers low during the first months of 2020, but in June the Palestinian health ministry said the epidemic had resurged, mainly in the Hebron district. Reported cases in the district climbed from 118 in mid-June to more than 1,600 by the end of the month, and infections across the Palestinian territories kept rising through July.

Earlier versions of this story described the West Bank as living under an Israeli "blockade". That word usually refers to Gaza. Hebron is in the West Bank, which is under Israeli military occupation, with restrictions on movement and trade that affect health care. In the summer of 2020 the Palestinian Authority had also suspended security and civil coordination with Israel, which disrupted arrangements for transferring patients, and funding cuts to Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem had added to the strain. A Haaretz analysis in July 2020 warned that the West Bank's second wave could spin out of control.

Why hospitals stopped visits

Strict visiting bans were common worldwide in 2020, not only in Palestine. Hospitals were trying to stop the virus spreading to other patients and staff, to save scarce protective equipment and to keep wards manageable when tests and vaccines were not yet available. Families in Europe, the Americas and Asia went through the same experience of saying goodbye by phone, through a window or not at all.

Over time, many hospitals introduced compassionate exceptions for patients at the end of life, often allowing one relative in full protective gear. Others arranged video calls on tablets held by nurses, or window visits at ground level. Those changes came partly because stories like this one showed how much harm enforced separation could cause, both to dying patients and to the people who grieve them afterwards.

The message Jihad wanted to share

After his mother's death, Jihad spoke openly about his own attitude to the virus. He said he had not taken the pandemic seriously at first and had thought the danger was exaggerated. He now saw that as a mistake and urged people in Palestine and elsewhere not to wait until the illness reached their own family before taking precautions.

That is a common pattern in public health. Risks feel abstract until they become personal, and by then it can be too late to change the outcome. His appeal was simple: listen to health advice, keep your distance where the virus is spreading, and wear a mask in crowded indoor spaces when advised.

What this story asks of the rest of us

There are two sides to taking this story to heart. The first is compassion. Jihad's vigil is a reminder that in any health emergency, rules made for good reasons still fall on real families, and institutions should build in humane ways for people to say goodbye.

The second is practical. Climbing the outside of a building is dangerous, and nobody should copy it. If a relative is seriously ill in hospital and visits are restricted, ask the ward staff or the hospital's patient liaison team about end-of-life exceptions, scheduled video calls or other ways to stay in contact. If you are worried about your own risk from an infection, especially with a condition such as cancer, talk to a doctor.

Rasmi Suwaiti died with her son keeping watch from the window. In a year of empty waiting rooms and lonely deaths, his five nights on that ledge showed the world how far love will go to stay close.

Sources: Interview with Jihad Al-Suwaiti by Arabic Post; photo shared by Mohamad Safa on Twitter and AJ+ français; outbreak figures from Wikipedia, COVID-19 pandemic in the State of Palestine.