Gaza- Like a uterus beating in a dead body, there is a call to prayer that is heard for the first time after being interrupted for several months, in a neighborhood whose mosques were all destroyed by Israel. You trace the sound and you are astonished by its emanating from an area that resembles a ghost town.
At four o’clock in the morning time, the muezzin holds the loudspeaker in his right hand, and closes his ear with his left hand, and with his warm voice calls to prayer, from the middle of the courtyard of the former “Salah al-Din Preparatory School”, one of the largest shelters for the displaced in the Rimal neighborhood in the Gaza Strip today.
The men gather to respond to the call in a basement room on which they have written “Musalla.” They have designated it for prayer, dhikr circles, and religious seminars. The dawn prayer seems to the displaced people here to be a starting point for each one of them to start what he seeks.
Going out to collect firewood in the morning is the task of the most prominent men in this war, while others go out to earn a living and what will help them survive, or to guard what was left of their destroyed homes, or to spend the day in the ruins of their homes away from the hustle and bustle of crowded people.
As for the women here, they agreed among themselves to rise before dawn to pray and perform the night prayers, and to begin their day after that in a race against the narrow time, as their concerns were limited to kneading, baking, washing, fetching water, whether salty or fresh, filling the tank, lighting the fire for cooking, and heating water for bathing, which are tasks. They believe that war has given them experience in it, after they were entrusted to machines to carry its burden for them.
Room for two families
The rooms that were called classrooms have now become homes that host extended families, numbering more than 15 people per classroom. On the door of the room was written the name of the family living in it, and one of the door titles was marked with the names of two different families, so Tel Aviv Tribune Net asked permission to enter.
A room of 25 square metres, divided between two families who do not know each other, separated by curtains and fabrics that they call partitions. Despite their lightness and fragility, they consider them to be walls that preserve their privacy or part of it, and in which they enclose their homes with all their daily activities.
Mervat Abdel-Al, the owner of the first section of the room, tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “The psychological state that befell me during my displacement, which exceeded 10 times, destroyed my body and my well-being,” as she says that she suffered from gallbladder and liver pain, and needed treatments and surgery that she could not afford, and she lost comfort during her day. In light of the duties required of her in this position.
For months, Mervat has been whispering while talking to her children, so as not to disturb those in the other half, who hear their breathing at night, so she often prefers silence or just nods.
Although she was unable to adapt or coexist with her new situation, what motivated her to endure it was her good relationship with her displaced friends. She says, “All the women here are my sisters. They even accompanied me during my stay in the hospital when I fell ill.”
Flour dough and stories
In the next room titled “The Family of Umm Ramzi al-Dalu,” a widowed woman who takes care of the affairs of her children and their descendants, more than 20 women gathered and distributed among themselves the tasks of preparing pastries for all the displaced people in the school, in implementation of an initiative launched periodically by activists.
In the room of Umm Ramzi, who received an artillery shell, the impact of which was patched with a thin wooden board, the ladies’ laughter rose loudly and they exchanged songs, jokes and interesting conversations, and while the hands were working, the ears were listening to the landlady, as she recounted the details of her daughter-in-law’s birth months ago, when she took her to Al-Shifa Hospital, and she was not there. An empty room to give birth, so she had to vacate a room where displaced people were crowded.
She says that she cannot describe the birth of a girl whose labor pains and cramps continued in the hearing of hundreds of displaced people who were sleeping at the outside door of the room where she was giving birth.
Umm Ramzi talks about her suffering, which consisted of searching for clothes for her grandson and his mother, and trying to provide food in times of famine so that the mother would be able to breastfeed, but she found nothing for her except sesame seeds and ajwa. But she was not always able to provide them with privacy and comfort during this season.
A mother present interrupted Umm Ramzi’s speech, saying, “I want to remove the diaper from my child and teach her to go to the toilet, but my presence in this place prevents that.”
Mrs. Umm Raed Al-Dalu broke the deadlock that ended with the women’s miserable conversation, as she rolled the dough after rolling it in flour, and hummed, “We saw woe, when we saw woe.”
“School is our neighborhood”
We moved next to Umm Raed, who was displaced to school in the first week of the war, and was prompted by the planes’ bombing of her daughter’s bride’s house on top of the people in it. She was martyred with her husband, in addition to the leaflets (paper notices) that the occupation threw at the area in which she lived, demanding that they evacuate to the south. .
Umm Raed refused to leave her city and move south, and chose to seek refuge in an UNRWA school, because she believed it was a “safe and fortified place,” before this belief dissipated when the school was besieged, and the occupation forces stormed it once, and bombed another.
She says, “We slept on the ground for 4 days with our children, 15 of us, and the sniper’s eye in the building opposite continued to watch over us, and we were left without food except “lollipops” (candy) that we distributed to the children whenever they cried from hunger…”
After the occupation withdrew, Umm Raed and the families returned to school. “Aren’t you afraid to go back and repeat what happened?” They said, “Our atmosphere cannot be found anywhere else. Our neighborhood was blown up and this school became our neighborhood. Each of us knows what we have and what we have, starting with the roles of cleaning the toilets and ending with emptying the trash cans.”
The women agreed to gather in the afternoon in the “guest house” after finishing feeding their families. By that, they meant “Umm Jamal Ashour’s room,” where they gathered because it was empty of men after the martyrdom of her husband and eldest son.
With the smile with which she greets arrivals, those who look at her seem to think that her heart has never been scratched, but when she starts talking, her sadness is revealed, especially when she goes through the details of the martyrdom of her son and husband.
Only two months separated the father and his son, and when Umm Jamal was asked about the circumstances of her husband’s martyrdom, her young child Muhammad interrupted her and answered, “On the day of the Kuwait Roundabout massacre, we went together on his bike to bring flour, but I returned alone and he returned as a martyr.”
With the pressure of tasks and the greatness of responsibility, Umm Jamal says that she does not find time to live or express her sadness, “however, my place is always full of guests from inside and outside the school.”
As for her daughter, Saja, she says that she does not like school, where she received the two biggest shocks she has ever been exposed to in her life, and the mother adds, “All the fear, hunger, and work on one hand, and loss on the other hand.”
Forget the Qur’an
The silence that pervaded the session was punctuated by the voice of Umm Rifaat Nabhan reciting the Qur’an, as she was approaching the end of completing it in one session within several hours. When she wanted to introduce herself to Tel Aviv Tribune Net, the speaker interrupted her and raised the page designated for recording errors, and said, “So far, she has recited 28 parts, and her page is blank without a single error.” She added, “This is how I can be known for her.”
When Umm completed the seal, her tears poured out and she prostrated a long prostration in which she asked God to write down the reward of her seal for her martyr husband, who was killed by the occupation months ago at the door of the school and buried opposite it. She said, “My husband was the one who encouraged me to memorize the Qur’an, and today I recite it without him being with me.”
Her husband’s body remained lying on the ground for 17 days, until he was buried with a group of other bodies in an empty lot opposite the school, after the occupation withdrew from the area. Umm Rifaat says, “I will visit my husband’s grave for the first time, to tell him that I dedicated the reward for reciting the Qur’an to him.”
The smell of paint wafted throughout the floor we were on, and I was astonished; Who would think about such a thing in this place and time? When asked, the people present responded with a cowardly laugh, “This is Rami’s mother who cannot sit!” as she was supervising the painting of the adjacent room that was burned by the occupation soldiers during the storming.
Umm Rami Hussein turned to the women who had gathered at the door of the room and said, “We will move our seminars, listening, and sessions to this room, and whenever they calm down, we will rebuild.”
It seems that Umm Rami’s stubbornness and defiance of the occupation did not start from this room, as the occupation destroyed her home and the homes of her children, but she turned her room at school into a second home, and here she launched courses for memorizing, interpreting, and recitation of the Qur’an.
“Mother of youth”
During Tel Aviv Tribune Net’s interview with Umm Rami, a number of young men asked for permission to enter her several times, and most of them called her, “Mother.” When asked about the number of her children, she answered with a smile, “None of these are my sons, but I am the mother of all of them, after the war separated them from their mothers, either in the south or Gaza or Qadhin Martyrs,” and because she was in charge of cooking for them, feeding them, and feeling what they lacked, they called her “Mother of the Youth” in school.
Rami’s mother cleaned up her destroyed house, stone by stone, and retrieved what was left from under the rubble, and arranged it in her room decorated with pictures of the family together, where the largest share of the pictures were of her son Fadl, who was martyred in the school yard with seven of his friends, after they finished ablution for the dawn prayer.
We accompanied Rami’s mother to the place where her son was targeted, but on the way she stopped in front of the tree seedlings that began to grow in front of her room. She said, “I pulled them out from under the rubble of our destroyed house, replanted them, watered them, and brought them to life after they were dead.” She added, “And so are we, no matter what death takes hold of us.” “We will live, despite Israel’s will, even if it tries to annihilate us.”
When we approached the scene of the attack in the school yard, where her son’s spirit rose, Rami’s mother stood on a spot near the water taps and said while turning around, “Here his spirit rose, and every time I walk from here, I feel a sense of my spirit rising.”
While the smell of cakes and Eid wafted through the place, Rami’s mother could smell nothing but the smell of her son’s blood, traces of which were still on the wall. She lost her strength and covered her face with her hands, then cried and hid her weakness, so the mothers ran to her to support her, and their stories were similar between the loss of the child, the house, and the money. It made their patting on each other’s shoulders useful, and the password between them was “It will pass.. but say, Lord!”