We were married on November 6, 1949. There were only two taxis in Khan Younis and they came from Jaffa, and my brother-in-law, Abdallah, apologized to my father about the lack of taxis to take my family to my husband’s family. But my father didn’t mind because the two houses were very close. My friends and sister-in-law and I went in one taxi and my stepmother, sisters, and brothers went in the other, while the rest of the family walked. When I was about to step inside my husband’s home, Abdallah shot into the air with his rifle to welcome me because he was so happy that his brother and I were finally together.
I loved Abdallah like my brothers because he was a great man and a great freedom fighter. He spent his life, from before 1936 until he was murdered in Jordan in 1970, carrying his rifle on his shoulder and struggling for freedom. A graduate of al-Rawda College in Jerusalem, Abdallah led the resistance against the British in the 1936–39 revolt on the southern front, as well as the resistance against the Zionists thereafter. In fact, Abdallah was among those wanted by the British, so he found refuge in Egypt at the end of the revolt when the British promised Palestinians they would restrict Jewish immigration into Palestine. He returned in the early 1940s, when the British Mandate authorities were preoccupied with the Second World War, and he continued his struggle for freedom. When Ibrahim was fourteen years old, he carried a rifle on his shoulder and waited for the trains with his rifle and hand grenades. Once Abdallah became very angry and even beat Ibrahim when he caught him sleeping with his rifle while waiting for the English, wondering how he could sleep in such a very dangerous place. After the 1947 partition plan, Abdallah’s activities intensified as Zionists started to attack Palestinians and burn their villages. He gathered men from his family, including Ibrahim who was a recent graduate, his old fighters, and other volunteers from Beersheba and Gaza, and led the fight to defend his land and the Beersheba district. He was a very brave man and great fighter.
When the Zionists occupied Ibrahim’s family land in Al Ma’in back in 1948, Abdallah and other fighters tried to defend it, but of course they couldn’t, having only light weapons to defend against the Zionist militia and their tanks and bombs. At that time, Zionists, with the knowledge and support of the British, had manufactured ammunition, rifles, and military cars, while Palestinians were not allowed to possess any sort of weapon. Abdallah was not in Al Ma’in then. He went to meet General Mawawi, the commander of the Egyptian forces who were preparing to enter Gaza. Ibrahim, his brother Mousa, and the other fighters and volunteers defended Al Ma’in with the means they had. They lost several men and by a miracle they managed to escape and save their lives when they realized that they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the Zionist militia.
I married Ibrahim when he was a lawyer, and later he became the city magistrate. He was paid five Egyptian pounds for every case, and sometimes more. This modest income was not only for us, but also for our extended family and poor people, but I managed to keep tight control over our spending. I wrote down what I bought in a notebook, and saved money piaster by piaster. Nobody knew how much I saved. When I would tell Ibrahim that I wanted to go for a holiday, he used to say that we didn’t have enough money, so I would lie and say I could borrow from my family and when we returned, we would repay it. Then I went to my family with the money in my pocket and returned with the same money, which I gave to Ibrahim, and then we travelled. Now I laugh when I read those notebooks and remember those days.
We lived in a small rented house in Khan Younis, and on August 12, 1950, I had my first child, a daughter. I named her Adala, meaning “justice,” and it was the first time this name was used in Gaza. I named her this because I liked it, because her father was the first lawyer and magistrate in Gaza, and also perhaps to bring justice for girls. As many know, our society, including the Bedouin, prefers boys, and Ibrahim’s family had wanted a boy. Even my father-in-law, whom I considered different from others, was the same, and I was a bit frustrated. It wasn’t enough that I became pregnant immediately and had my first child approximately nine months after marriage. I remembered that my mother had girls and only two boys, and her sister had girls, but no boys. All my sisters-in-law had boys, and my husband’s family were waiting for me to have one, so when I became pregnant with my second child, I prayed for a son.
I was expected to name my first son Hussein after his grandfather, but I didn’t like the name Hussein because it’s an old name and I wanted to give my son a modern name. But one night I had a dream about an old man who kissed my stomach and told me that I would have a male child, but I must promise to call my son by his name. I asked him his name and he told me a very strange name, which I said wasn’t nice and that the people of Khan Younis would laugh if I called my son this. So, he said to take some of the letters and call my son this name. It included all the letters of the name “Hussein,” so I agreed. When I opened my eyes and remembered the dream, I felt I would have a boy, and if I did, I would call him Hussein. I had a very easy and quick birth, just a few minutes and he was born.
I have a good memory for numbers, not only my children’s birth dates, but also my grandchildren’s. Since I was young, I have remembered dates and connected them to events. This first started on the day of the earthquake, then continued when my mother died, and then the years passed and the suffering increased with the occupation, and there have since been many, many stories drawn with dates and moments and details on my heart. Adala was born on August 12th; Hussein on October 2nd; Fawaz on March 3rd; Moeen on June 26th; Aida on October 16th; Nawaf on November 6th; Hamed on January 9th; Nasser on February 24th; and then Azza on March 3rd. We are very connected with the number nine, as many events that have occurred in our lives have been connected with this particular number. I have nine children, we moved to this house on September 9th, my son Fawaz travelled to Germany to study international law on September 9, 1971, and married on the 9th of September, and Azza graduated as a laboratory technician on September 9, 1981.
Later, we moved to another house, closer to my family home and much nicer and bigger than the first. It had many balconies, and from one of them we took a picture of my family home. The night we moved to that new home was when I became pregnant with Moeen, because I had him nine months after we moved.
Before Aida was a year old, she was teething and very sick the whole summer, and I thought we would lose her. I was so tired because of this, and also because at the same time, my brothers-in-law and their families came from Kuwait to spend the summer vacation with us. After this, I told Ibrahim that I wanted a break away from Khan Younis, but he said he had already used his holidays to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca and couldn’t take another. No matter what I did, I couldn’t help remembering the attack on Khan Younis in August 1955, when Israeli soldiers burned the police station, killed over seventy policemen, and wounded many others.2 When I looked from the eastern side of my home, I would imagine seeing the fire and the police station burning, and I thought if they had reached the police station, they could reach us. I became so afraid at night that I sometimes even took Ibrahim with me when I went to check the children. This feeling accompanied me for several months. I was so afraid of being in Khan Younis, and I told Ibrahim that if he didn’t take a holiday, he would find me one day jumping from the roof of the house. He asked what the matter with me was, and I said that I felt something in my heart, and was so worried and afraid and so tired that I wanted to leave. I think my worries transferred to him because he asked his boss for another holiday. He was a judge then. He was told that he had already taken his annual holiday, but Ibrahim said that he felt really tired and needed a break from his work. When his boss agreed and said he could start his holiday the next day, he couldn’t believe it, and when he told me the news, I jumped with happiness. It was October 4, 1956, and we left the next day. At that time, the train to Egypt came late in the afternoon, and I thought that in the one day I could pack the bags, iron and prepare our clothes, and do everything necessary. So, I quickly sent for Sal
ma, a lady who used to work at our home, to come very early the next morning to help me make date jam, preserve the olives, and crush and preserve red chillies because the season would be finished when we returned.
Adala was in the first class at school, so we decided not to take her. Aida was so sick that we thought it better for her to stay in Khan Younis, where my family could take care of her. Moeen was not yet toilet trained, so we decided to leave him also. We took only Hussein and Fawaz. I asked Salma to take care of the rest of the children while we were in Egypt, and I took them all to my family home, along with a bag containing the children’s clothes as well as food and money. My father asked how I could leave my children and where I would leave them, and I answered at their grandfather’s home: his home. He said, “But your daughter Aida is very sick.” I told him that she would be better off staying in Khan Younis than traveling with us to Egypt, and that I was sure my family and Salma would take good care of them while we were away. He was unhappy with us travelling without our children, but we had already made the decision.
We took the train to Egypt, and as soon as I left the cultivated fields of Rafah and the surrounding areas and saw the desert, I became very thankful and relieved. We arrived in Cairo on the morning of October 6th, as children were going to school. My uneasy feeling was correct: at the beginning of November, Israeli soldiers attacked and occupied the Gaza Strip.
4 / Massacre
ON OCTOBER 29TH, Israeli forces occupied the Sinai Peninsula. The next day they occupied the cities in the Sinai, and on November 1st, they began occupying the Gaza Strip. First, they occupied Rafah and then continued to Khan Younis, where a group of Egyptian soldiers fired at them, trying to defend the city. The Egyptians had offices and army posts in the Gaza Strip, and one unit, with a maximum of twenty soldiers, in Khan Younis. The soldiers often changed, because as one group went to Egypt, another replaced them. There were only a small number of soldiers in Khan Younis and other towns, because usually most of them were on the borders; of those, some were killed, and others escaped when they heard that Rafah was occupied. When these soldiers heard that the Israelis had occupied Rafah and were now coming to Khan Younis, they started shooting. The Israelis thought that there was a large group, so they left and continued toward Gaza City, which they occupied on November 2nd, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.1
In Cairo, we were sent a newspaper—I don’t remember whether it was Newsweek, The New York Times, or another English newspaper—by our representative in the UN, showing a picture of the Egyptian soldiers lined up against a wall and being shot by the Israelis. I counted, and there were about sixteen soldiers in the photograph. They even caught the Egyptian governor of Khan Younis and paraded him through the streets and passed by my father’s home. After the withdrawal, he was released.
Khan Younis was known as a brave city, a city of Fedayeen, of freedom fighters who were heroes and champions of the people. Right after the Nakba, Abdallah resumed his activities and managed to organize his old fighters and recruit many young people from the refugees who were eager to liberate their land and return home. So, the Israeli soldiers knew that Khan Younis would fight. They returned to the town on November 3rd and tricked the people. From helicopters flying very low in the sky, they called over loudspeakers for people to surrender and promised to spare their lives if they did so without a fight. They told everyone to go to their homes because they had occupied the city, and they said if people wanted to protect themselves and their families, they should stay in their homes and put white flags on the roofs of their houses because a curfew was being imposed. The people believed what they said, that this would save their lives and that the Israeli army had occupied all of the Gaza Strip, which was now under their control. In fact, they were not in Khan Younis at all, but on the eastern border waiting to enter. People went to their homes, and those who didn’t have any white material cut it from their clothes and hung it. My brother Hassan’s wife couldn’t find anything white, so she used her baby’s swaddling cloth.
When they saw from the helicopters that people were obeying them, the army entered Khan Younis and started their massacre of young men from fourteen to fifty years old. They entered houses, and any young males they found, they lined up against walls and killed, and then lined up the next group and killed them. People tried to escape, but couldn’t, and others hid, but the Israeli soldiers killed hundreds and hundreds of people that day. My brother Hassan, a graduate from Al Azhar University, was twenty-seven and married, with a son and a young daughter of four months. He lived in a separate house, but he thought that everyone should move to our family home to be together during that time. He was caught on his way to my father’s home with his family, and although he showed them his passport and identity card, and Afaf, his wife, showed them his school card identifying him as a teacher, they didn’t care. They lined him and other men up against the fourteenth-century Khan Younis castle, Barquq Castle, with their hands raised, and shot them all. The same day, Israeli soldiers entered my family home and found my children with my brothers and sisters, among them Nadid, hiding under the staircase of the house. They pulled Nadid out from among them, and while the children followed and he screamed, they dragged him across the floor of the room. His mother was pleading to the soldiers that he was a schoolboy, so that they would leave him, but they didn’t listen to her. The soldiers kept dragging him amidst the children’s screams, and then they shot him in the chest with several bullets. His blood ran onto the floor and the children cried. The soldiers then went to the houses next door and dragged out more young men amidst the cries and screams of their families, lined them up against the wall of the Khan Younis castle, and shot them. Nadid had been waiting to travel to Egypt to attend Cairo University because he had been accepted to study accounting. His permission was delayed, and while he was waiting, the Israelis invaded. His fate was to be killed instead. At the time we were stuck in Egypt, but we were told all the details by my family and children. Although my son Moeen was two and a half years old then, he still remembers the murder of his uncle in front of him and the blood flowing toward the door of the house.
All the men from our street except Ibrahim were lined up against the walls on the street and shot. In fact, they went searching for Ibrahim and broke our doors and burst into our home, but they didn’t find anyone, so they took Ibrahim’s certificates and our photos from the walls and smashed them on the ground and trampled on them. They also broke many things, such as a glass cabinet full of crockery and glasses. They shot into the wardrobes, and when I returned, I found many dresses with burns and holes from the bullets. After hundreds of men were killed that day, the order came to stop. That carnage continued for three days.
After the soldiers stopped shooting, the people who had survived took the bodies. My father brought three bodies to his home: my brother Hassan, and two men from a neighbouring family who were not natives of Khan Younis. One had come with his wife from Jerusalem, and she couldn’t deal with this tragedy alone, and the second was the brother-in-law of the first martyr’s wife, who had come to join Nadid to attend the university. So altogether there were four bodies. My father went to a neighbour, a merchant, for material to cover the bodies. Our neighbour told him that martyrs were not washed or covered with shrouds like other dead people, and my father replied, “Yes, they are martyrs, but they are also victims. They weren’t killed while defending their country, but were massacred.” After he had washed and covered them, he placed the four bodies in the middle of the house and prayed for them, and then put them on a cart borrowed from the neighbours, and with my sisters, who carried shovels to dig the graves, went to the cemetery. It was still curfew that night they walked to the cemetery, and I can’t imagine my sisters and children, at their ages and in those circumstances, with my father, digging and burying these bodies. That memory, which is too terrible to think about, was dug into their hearts and minds.
After his two sons were killed, and as he knew that
they were searching for Ibrahim, my father became frightened. He told Adala that if someone asked her name to say she was Adala Albatta, and not that she was Ibrahim Abu Sitta’s daughter, or her life might be in danger. He didn’t tell the others because they were very young.
After the Israeli occupying forces had control of the area, people continued to escape, by walking or by camel or donkey, through the Sinai Desert because the Israeli army didn’t control every area. Abdallah also succeeded in escaping from Khan Younis. He walked from Khan Younis beach to Rafah and on to Al ’Arish, and then some Bedouin from the Sinai helped him cross the desert on their camels and go on to Cairo. Had he been caught as a person wanted by the British and the Israelis, he would have been killed. So, Sheikh Hussein and all of us were relieved when we saw him. We saw people in Cairo who had escaped, and when Ibrahim asked them what had happened, they told him of the horrible massacres in Khan Younis and of my two brothers who had been shot and killed, but he didn’t tell me.
My father-in-law, Sheikh Hussein, was stuck in Egypt with us. He had come one month before us, and when he wanted to return, he was stopped by the invasion. We were all together in one flat, and when Ibrahim and Abdallah wanted to smoke, they left the room where we all sat because they didn’t want to smoke in front of their father. Although he was thirty-three years old, married with five children, and a Magistrate, Ibrahim never smoked in front of his father out of respect. My father-in-law became very angry and told them to smoke in front of him, even though he knew they didn’t want to, because he wanted us all to be together. While they were smoking in the same room, Abdallah told Ibrahim and his father what had happened in Khan Younis and other places, but they still didn’t tell me about my brothers, and I was so worried and felt that they were hiding something from me. I didn’t know until January 1957, when they finally decided I should be told and Ibrahim broke the news to me. I couldn’t believe them at the beginning because my mind rejected it. But then when I saw Ibrahim’s grim face avoiding looking into my eyes, as well as all the faces around me looking to the ground, I started to comprehend what had happened. I didn’t know what to say or how to react, or how to accept it. The place was full of men—Ibrahim’s brother Salman, who was studying engineering in Cairo, my father-in-law, Abdallah, my two sons, and even the man who helped us—so I went to my room. As soon as I entered the room, I felt like a bomb had exploded because I couldn’t stand this terrible news. I was almost four months pregnant with twins, and suddenly the floor was full of blood. I had miscarried. I could not even stand on my feet, and I was hysterical. Ibrahim supported me. He took me to the bathroom to wash and he cleaned up the blood on the floor. Then he put me to bed.
A White Lie Page 9