HOLON, Israel - The 2-year-old's flawed heart beat backward, pumping blue blood to his lips and inking rings around his eyes.
Ahmad edged across his hospital bed, toward his mother, Nasima Abu Hamed. Nasima, a Palestinian from Gaza, had brought Ahmad to Israel for an operation. She moved uneasily through hospital halls decked with Israeli flags - but the Jewish doctors could save her son.
A pediatrician named Yuval walked in wearing a white coat. Nasima smiled. Yuval high-fived Ahmad, who was wearing toddler-size army fatigues. Yuval said in Arabic, "How's he doing?"
Nasima shrugged and asked, "When is the surgery?"
Nasima was eager to return to Gaza. There was trouble at home, clashes with Israeli soldiers. Fear had kept her family up all night, the chop of hostile helicopters. Two years ago, a missile fired from a helicopter had killed two cousins. If Nasima ever met an Israeli pilot, she would "faint and die from fear," she said.
Yuval patted Ahmad on the head. The surgery would be soon. Later, Nasima called Yuval "our savior of the children."
Yuval does save children. He is also an attack helicopter pilot. It was Yuval in his Cobra - though Nasima didn't know it - hovering over her town, as Israeli troops battled armed Palestinians. By day, Yuval works as a pediatrician. By night, he fires missiles for the air force.
After decades of war, what might be madness in another society passes for normal in Israel. As negotiators try to resolve the Middle East conflict, Israelis find ways to resolve the conflict in their own lives. In the Bible, Ecclesiastes declares: "There is . . . a time to kill, and a time to heal." Yuval is doing both, at the same time.
Yuval, a 40-year-old major in the air force, is prohibited by the military from giving his last name. He lives with his wife, two sons, and a daughter on Palmachim air base, north of the Gaza Strip. The military has allowed Yuval to study medicine while he serves. When he isn't flying, Yuval treats children as a resident at a nearby civilian hospital.
"He's never home," his mother-in-law said. He's either on alert or on call. He's either dressed in a flight suit, carrying a ruler to calculate firing positions, or he's dressed in scrubs, carrying a measuring tape to gauge baby skulls.
When he was growing up on a farm, Yuval picked oranges with Palestinians from Gaza. For lunch, he brought bread and cheese; Palestinians boiled Arabic coffee. They became, Yuval thought, friends.
Yuval's oldest son was born in the 1990s, after the Oslo accords. He dreamed that his son wouldn't be drafted. Then, in 2000, the second Palestinian intifadah erupted. Suicide bombers blew up Israeli discos and cafes. Israelis responded with force. Palestinians from Gaza were banned, including the men who labored with Yuval.
Yuval flew targeted assassination missions, killing some 15 intifada members, he said.
In the past four months, the army says, more than 1,000 rockets and shells have been launched against Israel.
On one recent night, the army notified Yuval that four men from Islamic Jihad were attacking. He leaped out of bed and headed to his helicopter. There, he entered the coordinates - northeast Gaza, 4 miles from the Israeli town of Sderot - into his electronic map.
The flight to Gaza took five minutes. During the trip, Yuval pictured an Israeli bedroom, exploding.
"It's a terrible thought," Yuval said later, but it had occurred to him many times: The children of the Palestinians he had picked oranges with in his father's orchard were now launching rockets. "I'm sure I know some of them. You can't recognize them from the air."
All Yuval could see now were small, dark movements. Two figures behind a tree. A person crouching.
"This is it," Yuval recalled thinking. Yuval placed his cross in the middle of a thin, black figure. "I'm looking at someone whose role in life is to kill, and I have to stop him," he thought. "Now, now, now." Yuval's adrenaline surged.
His thumb pressed the red button hard. Yuval held his breath, hoping that "nothing comes into the cross, like another person."
But instead of turning the Palestinian into a black-hot burst, the missile thudded into the sand. His ammunition had malfunctioned, a dud. "No!" Yuval recalled thinking. He fired again. "Good hit," said ground troops, spotting for him. But by then, the two remaining rocket squad members had crawled close to the house.
Yuval had to decide: fly away and spare the civilians or fire again and fulfill his mission?
"Not good," Yuval said to his wingman, as they turned back.
After he landed, he tiptoed into his house and lay next to his wife. He thought: "I have to wake up in two hours and go to the hospital."
