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It did not take more than a few minutes for the news of the death of our leader to spread to Jerusalem and to every Arab capital. A general mourning was announced; the imams made the call to prayer from the minarets, church bells tolled, and the radio stations interrupted their broadcast for five minutes. Schools and institutions stopped their work, and the newspapers and magazines published special editions with large headlines mourning the leader. There were photos, articles, and poems praising him. Even the commanders in Damascus, the Arab League, the Arab leaders—both those who believed in him and those who did not, those who failed him and those who had betrayed him—mourned him in public and private ceremonies. There were telegrams, letters, flower wreaths from all over the world, from different nationalities. Women’s associations throughout the Arab world wore black. Preparations were underway for a huge funeral that would include Arab and foreign consuls, imams from al-Aqsa mosque and al-Azhar, and the priests of the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There would be a procession led by the band of a Muslim orphanage, the scouts, the Syrian Boy Scouts, the Najjada, and the popular resistance groups. It was as if they were bidding farewell to Palestine in the person of the leader and to al-Qastal, the last battle to be fought in Palestine. This is what happened: all the fighters left al-Qastal. They followed the commanders who carried the leader high on their shoulders and went down the mountain. From there, he was transported to Jerusalem surrounded by all the forces carrying their weapons. There was no one left in the square but the villagers who continued to chase the fleeing soldiers. They took their shoes and their weapons, then returned to their village with their booty, convinced that the liberation war was over, and they had done their duty.

I remained near the ambulance after I was given the necessary medical treatment by the weeping nun and the exhausted priest, sitting on the ground in the midst of the wounded. The military trucks left them behind to attend the funeral. I was then able to see the sight that embedded in my memory, one I have seen repeated for many decades, and in every Arab march. I first saw the villagers chasing the escaping soldiers and helping themselves to the booty; then I saw hordes coming down from the top of the mountain, like a trail of ants trying to catch up with the procession. Some of the older men were still in their military outfits, their heads uncovered and their kaffiyehs wrapped around their necks, carrying whatever weapons they had found thrown on the ground, or those they had gotten as the spoils of war. There were also those who had come out of their hiding places and in the adjoining villages and farmhouses, and flocked down the muddy roads, coming from higher ground and rolling down between the rocks, in a heated race to reach the road below. It seemed as if all the villages around the settlements were emptied of men in order to attend the funeral and be part of the procession.

To add irony to these dramatic events, British–Jewish planes flew over the procession and the funeral, and over every Palestinian village and city where there were symbolic funerals and processions. They threw leaflets announcing the end of the fight following the death of the leader and the humiliating defeat of all the Arab countries. It was hardly two hours after we received the news, and as the crowds thickened like swarms of ants, with still more arriving, the enemy assumed that those coming down the mountain were running away from the Jews. The only people left in the villages were pregnant women, wet nurses, women with many dependents, the elderly, and the handicapped. The Jews attacked those villages and, encountering no resistance whatsoever, they abused the population and committed horrendous crimes and massacres against the civilians. That was when the well-known Deir Yassin massacres took place. I will come back to this story later, as I want now to squeeze my memory and remember the events of that day, the confusion and the immense sadness over the loss of the leader, and what I saw while waiting with the wounded to be transported to a hospital or clinic, hoping to make it to the funeral of the leader.

In the evening, while I was still in the clinic at the convent, Wahid and Rabie came, having checked all the hospitals and clinics looking for me. They had participated in the funeral. They shed tears and listened to speeches and messages and read the fliers with deep concern. They remembered al-Qastal, for which we had shed precious blood, and for which, in his effort to recover it, the leader had given his life. It had remained empty and was abandoned. They rushed to one of the commanders who had not lost his mind and convinced him to send whatever number of armed men he could gather to protect al-Qastal from a possible invasion. They bid me farewell in order to return to al-Qastal, and advised me to go to Nablus to see my mother, who had had a heart attack when she learned the tragic news. They asked me to look for Widad as well, who was lost; there was no trace of her in any hospital or clinic.

They left me and in the evening the priest told me that I could leave. I roamed the streets of Jerusalem, which looked like a ghost town. There were mourning flags raised over its buildings, and photos of the leader everywhere. The ground was covered with the flowers that fell from the crowns, and hundreds of fliers, and garbage, and the detritus of the thousands of mourners who participated in the funeral. I saw some sidewalks broken, public benches pulled up, electricity and telephone poles torn down by the moving crowds. All the shops were closed and looked abandoned. The leader was no more and Jerusalem was suffocating. There wasn’t a single green branch left; even the trees that lined the streets looked naked, their branches broken under the weight of the young boys who climbed up to watch the procession, and possibly to cut some branches and spread their leaves over his tomb. The trees too had insisted on taking part in the procession: their branches bending and their leaves falling from grief.