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Hamas turns to old women for bombings

Palestinian Hamas supporters attend a Hamas rally in the town of Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday. PHOTO: EPA

In the center of Beit Hanoun, there is nothing left of the 800-year-old mosque but the minaret. It looks like a lighthouse stranded in a sea of rubble. People whose homes were demolished during the latest Israeli army incursion sit on plastic chairs around bonfires. At night they bunk down with the neighbors. One of them is Watfa Kafarna.

"I saw the Israeli soldiers eye-to-eye," she said. "They took my four-year-old grandson, Mahadi, who has Down's syndrome. They shook him and yelled: `Where are the guns?' Now he is traumatized and wets the bed every night."

Not his own bed -- the Kafarna family is homeless, living off the charity of friends. Tears run from Watfa's eyes as she looked at her son, daughter-in-law and grandchild huddled around a brazier. Her husband, Diab, shuffled across the ruins towards his wife.

"Bossa!" he said, "A kiss!"

In a highly unconventional move, Diab kissed his wife on the mouth.

"She is my heart, my eyes, my light. We have lost our house but not each other," he said.

During the incursion, Israeli soldiers detained all men aged between 16 and 40, including Watfa and Diab's sons and grandsons. The army targeted the mosque, attempting to arrest militants hiding there.

The women put up their own resistance, gathering as human shields around the mosque to help the militants escape.

"I am 72," Watfa said, "but by doing this I felt 20, young and useful and ready to act."

She pulled off her long veil and held it high in her right hand.

"I waved my hijab as a white flag and prayed with the other women in front of the holy mosque. But the Israelis continued to destroy it," she said.

Two women were killed by the Israeli Defense Force that day. Watfa was bruised, as was 70-year-old Fatma Najar, hit by a bulldozer.

Three weeks later, Najar blew herself up near Israeli soldiers, wounding two. In Gaza she is seen as a heroine.

"If the Israelis came to my house to gun down my children and I had a belt, I would do the same," Watfa said.

"The woman is the biggest loser here," Khola, a neighbor, standing on the remains of a kitchen where flour is mixed with pulverized masonry, said. Two hundred homes were destroyed in Beit Hanoun.

"Fatma Najar, an old woman, did what many people don't have the guts to do. If you go back and research Fatma,"Khola said, "you will see her home was destroyed on top of her head, her sons jailed, her grandson killed."

"We want to believe in peace, but how can we when the warplanes still fly over our heads every night," Watfa asked, "making our grandchildren cry and wet themselves? When there are still tank movements on the border? I can't believe there will be peace."

Najar's family heard of her attack on the radio.

"We thought it must be another Fatma Najar," said her son, Jihad.

"It never occurred to us it could have been my mother. Then the crowds started to arrive and we knew it was true. We had mixed feelings, sadness at her irreplaceable loss. But pride too," he said.

The funeral tent is empty now, the three days of official mourning over. On the first evening, men from the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, arrived.

"Your mother has been asking to do this for two years. We said no. Finally she said, if you don't give me a belt I will go anyway and get killed and my blood will be on your hands. We gave in," they told her son.

Over the weekend Hamas held a ceremony in Beit Hanoun, in memory of the 140 Palestinians killed last month. The mayor, Nazek el-Kafarna, made a speech in honor of Najar.

"This old lady looked at the houses destroyed and the trees uprooted. She looked at how our people had been humiliated. She took her soul in her hand and rushed to her martyrdom," he said.

The audience was thronged with women, many elderly, many clinging to photographs of their dead.

"We all want to be like Fatma," they shouted.

"I am happy about the ceasefire," Zaifa said. "But if the Israelis come back, they will see what we will do ... be like Fatma Najar."

"I know at least 20 of us who want to put on the belt," Fatma Naouk, 65, said.

"Now is the time of the women. Now the old women have found a use for themselves," she said.
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