Tel Aviv Tribune Net correspondents
Ramallah- To reach the home of Sheikh Saleh Al-Arouri’s family, in the town of Aroura, northwest of the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, we had to take alternative roads within a series of neighboring villages, instead of the original road that had been closed by the Israeli occupation since the beginning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
After the announcement of Al-Arouri’s martyrdom in a bombing in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, young men gathered in the center of his town throughout the night and into the morning, to receive journalists and mourners in the mosque next to his family’s home, where the martyr spent years during his childhood and adolescence, and where the flags of the Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” were raised.
Aroura seemed as if she had not slept, especially his family and grandchildren. Hundreds were knocking on the door of Aisha, Al-Arouri’s mother, and she responded to them with “Praise be to God” for the fate that her son met as a martyr, as he wished, as he asked her to pray for him.
He spent his youth in prison
The old Al-Arouri family home is years older than the occupation, and here Saleh was born and lived until he was 18 years old, then he moved to study Islamic law in the city of Hebron in the south of the West Bank. Upon his graduation, he had previously been arrested by the Israeli occupation for two full years, and was released for months before his second arrest. Which lasted 15 years.
His older sister, Dalal, talks to Tel Aviv Tribune Net about his difficult experience, especially in the second arrest, which lasted 15 years, and how he was absent in prisons for months without the family knowing anything about him, and his mother was not allowed to see him except in the courtroom after a year and a half of military investigation (an investigation accompanied by violent torture). ).
Dalal says: “When she saw him, he was a skeleton, and he had lost more than 40 kilograms of weight due to torture and isolation. She could not bear it and lost consciousness.”
The mother added to this by saying that she traveled between all the Israeli prisons to visit him, and that at times she would arrive at the prison doors and be prevented from seeing him, and that he spent continuous years in isolation.
But the visit that was engraved in her memory was in the Negev Desert Prison, where she returned late at night and found her husband (his father) dead and buried without her saying goodbye to him, and he was the one who instructed her when she left the house at dawn to deliver a message to him: “Your father is fine. From this world except seeing you.”
Al-Arouri had gotten engaged to a girl from the town before his long detention. After his release in 2007, he married and lived in the same house with his mother, but the occupation did not give him much time. After 3 months, he was re-arrested for another 3 years, after which he was deported to Syria.
The mother remembers, while speaking to Tel Aviv Tribune Net, the day her son got out of prison, told her about his deportation, and asked her to accompany him. She says with great sadness how she preferred not to see him rather than have him remain in prison, and she advised him to accept the deportation and begin his life with his wife away from her.
Since his deportation in 2010, Aisha has not met her son, nor was she able to meet her grandchildren, one of whom bore her name. She communicated with him throughout the years of his deportation only by phone. Every time she tried to travel, she received an Israeli decision preventing her.
He was prepared for his fate
The sisters continued their conversations, and each of them remembered something that completed the biography of Sheikh Al-Arouri. Safiya, for example, recalled the details of their last call on the morning of October 7, with the start of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, when the rumor of his assassination spread. “I called him directly, and he replied to me, laughing, that he was fine. He added, “Here are our fighters who have entered the Gaza Strip.”
Since that day, his family has been completely cut off from news of his martyrdom at every moment, as Safia tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net, adding, “Whoever chooses this path, his fate is known to him and to us.”
What reinforced his mother’s feeling of his imminent martyrdom was that he sent her a sum of money shortly before the 7th of October, and when she asked him about the reason for that, he told her that he “did not want to leave behind a debt” and asked her to pray for him to succeed in what was coming to him.
We spent more than 6 hours in the family home, which was not empty of “well-wishers” for his martyrdom, not only from Aroura but from all of the West Bank, and from various sectors of the Palestinian street. The house could no longer accommodate them, so the family moved to a hall in the town to receive congratulations on his martyrdom, for a period of time. 3 consecutive days.
Of course, the occupation did not like the influx of Palestinians to the town of Al-Arouri and his home, so it closed some of the roads leading to the village with iron barriers, which the family considered to be retaliation against them and the martyr.