Get out yer hankies, folks. This one's a real tear jerker.
Ashkelon — In the Gaza Strip's Jab aliya refugee camp, Aref Suleiman was raised on Palestinian struggle against the Jewish state. Today he lies in an Israeli hospital bed, his body riddled with Palestinian bullets, his wounds tended daily by Israeli nurses.
Which goes to show that some people are capable of putting aside age old hatreds, the Palestinians just don't happen to be among them.
For the 22-year-old Mr Suleiman, who was shot five times point blank by Hamas militants last month during a renewed bout of Palestinian infighting, this is not the Arab-Israeli conflict he learnt about as a child growing up in Gaza's desperate, rubbish-strewn alleys.
So Aref, how do you like your Islamo-terror buddies now that theyÂ’ve installed some central ventilation for you?
"Palestinians shoot me and Jews treat me,"
And howÂ’s that cognitive dissonance thingy working out for you?
... he laughs bitterly. "It was supposed to be different."
Yeah, you were supposed to kill all of these kind people who are working so hard to save your worthless life. Do you feel a strange unfamiliar twinge in the left side of your chest? ThatÂ’s called gratitude, asshole. Something you wouldnÂ’t recognize in a month of Sundays even if it bit you on the face.
The Barzilai Hospital sits on a sandy hilltop above the Mediterranean Sea in the southern Israeli port city of Ashkelon. In recent months, five Palestinian rockets have landed in the grassy dunes that encircle it, just six miles from the Gaza Strip.
"We'll teach you Jew dogs to treat our wounded and save their lives!"
Barzilai, however, has become a rare bastion of civility in an increasingly hate-filled conflict and a unique meeting ground for two peoples who otherwise have little direct contact. Wounded Palestinians who get permission from the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army are allowed into Israel to seek medical treatment that is not available at Gaza's rudimentary clinics.
After receiving costly lifesaving intensive care most Palestinian survivors are immediately shot upon their return as possible Israeli collaborators. An Intifada leader explained, “We can’t take any chances that these casualties may have developed some sort of sympathy for the dreaded Jews who struggled so valiantly to save their lives.”
Here, Israelis and Palestinians meet their erstwhile foe, in many cases for the first time in their lives.
Outside of a gunsight.
Mr Suleiman, who was only 15 when the second intifada erupted in 2000, had never been to Israel or met an Israeli.
But he refuses to let that interfere with his intention of killing every last one of them.
Suleiman, a guard in the Palestinian security services who was a devoted follower of the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.
As he flirts with the Israeli nurses who bring him lunch, check his wounds and blood pressure and empty his bed pan, Suleiman seems, at least for the time being, to have forgotten historical grievances.
"You uncovered Jewish slut! I want to stain that snow white uniform with, with ... your Zionist blood!"
"The Jews are like honey, like flowers," he says theatrically. "They wash me, clean me, and change my gown every day. Even in my home, my own family wouldn't change me every day."
Some people have less patience with fully-grown incorrigible bed wetters.
"Here, everything is beseder," he adds, using the Hebrew word for "okay".
Well, that does it, heÂ’s speaking Hebrew. Better kill him now, heÂ’s been totally infected by the Jews.
For the young Israeli nurses, most from nearby communities that live in constant fear of the Palestinian rocket fire, the cultural exchange flows both ways. The Palestinian patients they treat put a human face on the conflict.
Slap a clown mask onto a hyena and you can put a “human face” on it as well. However, just like with a Palestinian, it won’t change anything, not even the smell.
Nurse and patient can even find a shred of common cause now that the Islamist Hamas movement, which has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings, is locked in a deadly power struggle with the more moderate Fatah movement.
Saying Fatah is "more moderate" than Hamas is like saying the Wehrmacht was more moderate than the Schutzstaffel.
Victims on both sides of the war's de facto frontline are treated side by side here.
Well, not quite side by side.
Five doors down from Mr Suleiman, Ludmilla Visiptzky, 60, awaits her third session of surgery to patch up the shrapnel wounds she suffered when a Palestinian Qassam rocket struck her home in mid-May.
Let's all hope she was first in line at the blood bank for any transfusions.
Both confined to their hospital beds, the two patients have had little contact, but each knows the other is within shouting distance. Meanwhile Nurse Kokhava Kohi, says gleefully of her patient, Mr Suleiman: "He's going to go home and shoot Hamas in the head," - as if that alone would justify her daily ministrations.
Patch 'em up, head 'em on, move 'em out, shoot 'em up. Yeehaw!