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.

I couldn’t eat and spent seven days in my room, crying for my brothers. Nobody knew I had miscarried; they all thought I had a bad flu and was still grieving the loss of my brothers. After I had recovered a little, Ibrahim rented a flat so we could be on our own, and I took our two sons and went there. I registered them in a kindergarten that ran from the morning until the afternoon, so I could be alone with my grief and sorrow as long as I could, and not show my children my suffering and pain. I was so tired and shocked and almost crazy, crying all the time and not able to concentrate on anything. Because of this, one day when I was alone, I spilled some boiling oil on my hand and burned it badly. I screamed loudly from the severe pain and quickly rushed to find my wallet to go and buy some medicine. I ran into the street with my hand in the air, trying to find a pharmacy, but because I wasn’t familiar with the area, I didn’t find one on our street and ran for a long time until I found one. The pharmacist examined my hand, applied some cream, and bandaged it, and when I asked if I needed antibiotics or penicillin, he said the cream was enough, and so I left. Five minutes later, I found him following me with my wallet, which I had left behind.

Ibrahim used to go to Palestine Radio in Cairo for news of Palestine. He was always so sad and shattered because of the news he had received about the Gaza Strip that he looked like he had been beaten, but he didn’t ever say a word. When he arrived that afternoon, he didn’t notice my hand in a sling, but asked why I wasn’t eating. When I started to cry, he noticed my hand. That whole night, I couldn’t sleep and cried from the pain, so the next morning when Ibrahim went to the radio station, he told a friend what had happened, and his friend sent his mother to our home to help me. She advised me to go to another pharmacist for my hand because of the continuous pain. As soon as I went outside, I saw a pharmacy in front of the apartment and was surprised that I hadn’t seen it the day before. This pharmacist had studied in Germany, and he asked whether I’d had a penicillin injection and advised me to have one immediately. He gave me penicillin and made a cream for me of penicillin, sulpha, and vitamins all mixed together, and told me to come every day so he could check and clean the wound and replace the bandage. I was so afraid that my hand would be damaged, but he said not to worry because he was giving me the correct treatment, and that in the end, I would not be able to tell the difference between both hands. I went to him for eighteen days, and in the middle of the treatment my fingers became so swollen that my wedding ring had to be cut. The jeweller said he would fix it when I had recovered, and when my hand was better, he fixed the ring without payment; he just thanked God I had recovered.

When I discovered that Abdallah was sending someone to bring his wife and children to him, I asked that he also bring our children and Salma, and with the help of some Bedouin, they arrived on February 5, 1957. When I didn’t see Aida among them, I asked Adala if she had died, but she said, “No, here she is.” I was surprised at how much she had changed. She had become very fat and her face was big and healthy, because during the curfew everybody had fed her a lot; so, she didn’t walk early like the rest of the children, who had walked at one year. She walked at eighteen months.

We remained in Egypt until the Israelis left Khan Younis and the international observers came, and the Egyptians had returned to administer as before. The train started again from Cairo on March 21, but we didn’t take it because we wanted to be sure that it would arrive safely. A friend of Ibrahim was in Egypt the same time we were there and tried to return two days before us, but he reached Al Qantara and couldn’t cross the Suez Canal because the Israelis had occupied the area, so he returned to Cairo. We took the third train to Gaza and arrived in Khan Younis on March 23rd. While we were on the train, Moeen saw a soldier wearing a green uniform, and he screamed and cried, “Jews! Jews!” I told him, “No, that is not a Jew, he is an Arab and he won’t harm you.” The soldier asked what was the matter and why Moeen was screaming. I told him that my son had recently come from Gaza where he had witnessed the murder of his uncle and seen lots of blood, and that now he was afraid of anyone wearing a green uniform because for him it meant murder and killing. While I was explaining to the soldier, Moeen cried, “The Jew wants to shoot me,” and I comforted him.

When we returned, we saw the destruction of Khan Younis and the damage to our home, but I didn’t care because I wanted to be with my family, and I spent most of my time there. The place was full of sorrow and grief, and everyone in the city and the camps was dressed in black. All of Khan Younis dressed in black for more than five years, and even when they stopped, their hearts were still black with grief. Everyone had lost a father, brother, uncle, son, friend, or neighbour. After the Israeli withdrawal, people organized funerals because they weren’t able to express their feelings during the occupation, and we had one for my brothers. Then came the time for helping the widows and orphans of the tragedy, and although year by year the sorrow decreased, it remained in people’s hearts.

In 1958, while Ibrahim was mayor of Khan Younis, he investigated and recorded the names of one thousand people who had been massacred. He reached this number, but there were another five hundred whose names and details he couldn’t register. These fifteen hundred people were massacred by Israeli soldiers, and I consider this to be one of the worst massacres in history. I always wonder why nobody mentions the Khan Younis massacre that was committed on November 3, 1956 and why it has not been publicized, because the tragedy was so great that we can say it lives in everyone’s home. I don’t know why this is. I can understand why the Egyptians ignored it, because they left us and escaped. I can understand the western world including America not mentioning it because of their blind support of Israel, and I can understand that America ignored it because it didn’t want to admit that Israel committed a war crime in this massacre of innocent civilians. But the thing I can’t understand is why Palestinian television hasn’t given it sufficient coverage, and I always raise this question. We have to shed light on those victims, and at least publicize what happened. The day before yesterday, the forty-fifth anniversary of the massacre,2 I reminded the Ministry of Education and asked for a minute’s silence for the dead. Palestinian television interviewed me and other guests about it, and I told about how I received the news when I was gone, and about my feelings. In fact, it is very terrible to get news like this when you are away. You want to be with your family, but you can’t go. You need to support your family, but you yourself need support. You are alone, very far away, and devastated. You are shattered and worried twenty-four hours a day. You can’t sleep, you can’t do anything, you can’t even return.

Sharon was one of the leaders of the army in 1956. He was the commander of a paratrooper brigade deployed during the Suez War,3 when Egyptian prisoners of war were killed in the Sinai Desert. Many Egyptian soldiers crossed the Sinai in their escape to Egypt when they heard that the Israelis had occupied the Gaza Strip. During this time, Israeli soldiers were landing by parachutes in the Sinai Desert, and they caught many soldiers who weren’t able to reach Cairo, as well as soldiers already there. They killed many of them, but there was still a large number of prisoners of war; they didn’t return these prisoners to Egypt because they wanted to defeat Abd Al Nasser by killing his army.4 At that time, Abd Al Nasser had an important position in the Islamic and Arab world and played a very important role in uniting the Arab world. A group of Israeli soldiers was ordered to shoot some of the soldiers and bury the rest alive. Therefore, many young Egyptian soldiers were killed after they were caught and many others were buried alive, which is against all human rights laws and international agreements to protect prisoners of war.5 The soldiers who left Gaza and couldn’t cross the desert were annihilated in the Sinai, and it was a horrible massacre. Egypt still demands compensation from Israel for the families of those prisoners, and has published, in both Egyptian and international newspapers, lists of names and of the numbers of prisoners of war killed in the Sinai.6 It has demanded an investigation into what happened in the Sinai, but there has been no response. I think that lists of prisoners have been given to international human rights organizations to be investigated.

Our trip to Egypt saved Ibrahim’s life, as most of the young men of his age were killed during the war, and if he had been in Khan Younis, he would surely have been among them. My feeling was right that October, when I was worried all the time and wanted to leave Khan Younis as quickly as possible. I don’t know why I felt that I had to leave; my heart was always heavy then, because I thought something bad was going to happen. Ibrahim always told me it was strange that I made him leave then, because he had already used his holidays that year; also, it was October, the beginning of the academic year, and not summer, when people usually took their holidays and travelled. He said that he later understood the meaning behind my wanting him to leave Khan Younis, and that it was luck that he was given that holiday. It was a strange request at the time, but later he understood.

When they withdrew from Gaza in 1957, it was the first time ever that the Israeli army had withdrawn from a land they occupied, and it was because they didn’t have a choice.7 Three countries entered that war: France, Britain, and Israel.8 The French and British were not concerned about the Gaza Strip; they were more interested in the Suez Canal, Port Said, and other places, so they left it for the Israelis. But all of them were partners, and the French and British, because they are colonizing countries, provided assistance to the Israelis in all areas: military equipment, weapons, and approval to do whatever they wanted. Even now it still runs in their blood. Look what’s happening in Afghanistan. Britain runs after America even though it has no interest or partnership, but it’s in their blood: the blood of the colonizer. Britain colonized the world and then brought the Israeli occupation to Palestine in 1917, when Balfour, Britain’s then foreign secretary, promised to make Palestine a national home for the Jews.

When the three occupying forces withdrew from the Sinai and the Gaza Strip in 1957, international observers came, but the people of Gaza didn’t accept their administration in place of the Egyptians and demonstrated to demand their return. During these demonstrations, a Palestinian called Mohammad Mishrif was shot and killed by an international observer, when he climbed the wall of what is now the legislative council building and replaced the UN flag with the Palestinian and Egyptian flags. The next day, the demonstrations spread, with demonstrators chanting the same thing: “Our flag should always be waving because Mohammad Mishrif raised it.” It was then decided that the Egyptian administration would return, and the international observers would serve on the borders. The Egyptian administration returned on March 14, 1957, and we celebrated this day, called “Withdrawal Day,” every year in the schools.9

When Gaza was occupied, nobody thought that the Israeli soldiers would leave the Gaza Strip, and in fact they also didn’t think they would leave. The proof of this is that the day before they received orders to withdraw, they brought in electricity poles and equipment to install electricity in Khan Younis, and when the order was issued, they didn’t have time to take the equipment with them. This was good for Khan Younis because at the end of 1957 and beginning of 1958, electricity was installed, not everywhere, but in some places, and it was a historical event. We had electricity in our home in 1958. During that time, the UNRWA improved its education programs and health and social services for refugees, and the Egyptian administration also helped the refugees and the people. The situation improved a little compared to before, but we were still cut off from the West Bank. If Ibrahim or anyone wanted to go to Jerusalem or the West Bank, he had to travel to Cairo by train, and from there, by plane to Amman, and from Amman to the West Bank via the Allenby Bridge.