Occupied Jerusalem- On a street called “Youssef Fatiha” in Jerusalem, after a martyr with the same name who rose during the “setback,” Tel Aviv Tribune Net walked in search of his home to meet his wife, Khadija, and dig up her memory, from which the painful chapters of the war had not faded, despite the passage of 57 years since its outbreak.
Behind a blue banner that says “Youssef Fateha 23,” the late man’s house is located in the Ras al-Amoud neighborhood in the town of Silwan, whose people, walls, and every corner bore witness to one of the harshest stories of the war that began on June 5, 1967.
At that time, Israel launched a war against 3 of the neighboring Arab countries: Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. It lasted 6 days, in which the Arab parties were defeated. Among its results was the occupation of East Jerusalem and the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the end of Jordanian rule in the Holy City.
Fighting athlete
At the end of the 1950s, Khadija married the Jerusalemite sports teacher, Youssef Fatiha, “the man whose name people repeat and hide from,” in reference to his prestige and the strength of his presence, according to his wife.
Youssef was a brave young man with a high sense of patriotism. He went out before the outbreak of the war and during it to distribute weapons to the people of Jerusalem to confront the occupation, in cooperation with the former mayor of Jerusalem, Anwar Al-Khatib, who was exiled from the city shortly after the setback on charges of incitement to disobedience against the occupation authorities, according to his wife.
“His heart was the heart of a lion, and he was a prominent figure among the reformists and activists in Jerusalem. He went out on the second day of the war in search of a car to take his brother’s wife and her children to Jordan, and dozens of meters away from the house he was targeted by a mortar shell that led to the amputation of his arm and leg, and he bled until he was martyred.” .
Youssef rose in front of a Jordanian army camp that was located near his home. His family did not find out until hours later when they became suspicious. His father went out to look for him and found him covered in his own blood. A neighbor noticed him while he was screaming and trying to wake up his martyred son, calling him, “Yaba, yaba.”
The two men were unable to carry Youssef, due to the severity of his injury, so the family’s neighbor decided to remove an iron door in front of his house, stretched the martyr over it, and walked with him towards the family’s home.
Grave at home
“Due to the severity of the shells and the horrors of war, the family was unable to bury my husband in the Bab al-Rahma cemetery, so his father dug a hole at the entrance to the house, buried him in it, and planted an olive tree over his grave,” Khadija added.
The wife did not know that the moan would become her companion, her children’s companion, and her husband’s mother as soon as Joseph was buried in the courtyard of the house.
Regarding that chapter of pain, the elderly Umm Yasser Fatiha (81 years old) said that she and his mother used to sit next to the grave every morning to read the Qur’an, and then read it at length with Yusef’s father over his grave on Thursday of every week.
As the war intensified and all the residents of the neighborhood got married and Fatiha’s family remained alone, her father-in-law decided for the family to move to the city of Jericho, east of Jerusalem, because his wife feared that the Israeli army would storm the house and rape the women in it because of his bad reputation that spread during the 1948 war.
“We fled on foot to the town of Al-Eizariya with my five children and my fetus, which I was seven months pregnant with, and from there we continued our way by car towards Jericho. After about a week, news of the end of the war began to come, so my father-in-law decided to return immediately to our home in Jerusalem… and so we did.”
Exhuming the grave
Mourning over the grave was a daily ritual for the martyr’s mother and his wife, and his daughters took turns sitting next to him throughout the day. One of them brought food and said that she wanted to feed him, and the other sprinkled his grave with water and said that she wanted to water it. The family remained like this for 6 consecutive months, so the father of the martyr decided to exhume the grave. He was transferred to the Bab al-Rahma cemetery, adjacent to Al-Aqsa Mosque.
“They uprooted the olive tree that was planted over his grave and moved it to a nearby place. This tree is still bearing fruit and we eat from its fruit after it was planted on the most painful day in my life, June 6, 1967,” Umm Youssef added.
Khadija gave birth two months after her husband’s ascension, and she named her baby Youssef so that this name would remain alive in the house, but no one can replace the departed, or at least that is what this elderly woman believes.
When asked whether the current war on Gaza had ignited in her heart the pain she experienced in the 1967 war when she was a young woman in her twenties, Khadija did not think much about the answer, and immediately responded, saying, “The current war has never experienced anything like it in the history of the world… They burned the Gazans alive and the world is watching.” “And he does not move a trace. The setback war is considered a passing cloud compared to what is happening now.”
We left Khadija’s house not before her husband’s brother, “Abu Walid,” greeted us. He was the one who married her 3 years after the martyrdom of Youssef, because his father begged Khadija’s family for her and her children to stay in his house because they were “the oxygen of his life” after the deceased’s departure.
