Israel had tried to kill him five times. On the sixth occasion, this Thursday, it succeeded; and today there are no lips that do not pronounce his name in the Nur Shams refugee camp. Abu Shuyaa was much more than one of the more than 20 dead in the Israeli military offensive, one of the largest in two decades in the West Bank. Even more than his title: leader since 2022 of the Tulkarem Brigade of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad. “People listened to him more than Abu Mazen,” the discredited president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mahmoud Abbas, for which the author of the phrase works: Samer Yaber, the father of the deceased. He tells it with fortitude, together with a dozen men who nod and accompany him in mourning, drinking water sitting on plastic chairs. It is the closest thing to a cafe in this labyrinth of streets where workers and residents repair the walls of bombed-out houses and streets torn up by bulldozers.
Abu Shuyaa’s family history illustrates, like few others, the bloody downhill slide of the Middle East conflict over the past quarter-century. His grandfather came from the city of Haifa. He is one of the refugees from the Nakba – the flight or expulsion of some 750,000 of the million Palestinians living in present-day Israel between 1947 and 1949 – who ended up in Nur Shams, near the city of Tulkarem. His father, now 49, joined the police force of the newly created PA in the 1990s, the pseudo-government in parts of the West Bank created by the Oslo Accords. “Honestly, at that time everyone had the same idea: that the PA was here to end the occupation. After a while we realised that they were here to fight us,” he says.
The optimism was short-lived: in 1994, an ultra-nationalist settler opened fire in the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron during prayers, causing a massacre that led to the start of Palestinian suicide bombings. Another Jewish radical assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 – the prime minister who had wanted to “give peace a chance” – and Israel expanded Jewish settlements in the West Bank at an unprecedented rate, while dozens of Palestinians littered buses, markets and cafes with corpses by detonating their explosive belts. The visit in 2000 of the then opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, to the same Temple Mount in Jerusalem where a current ultra-nationalist minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, wants to build a synagogue, lit the final fuse of accumulated frustration and disappointment, and the Second Intifada broke out.
This is the decade in which Mohammed Yaber, the real name of Abu Shuyaa, was born in 1998. His childhood was marked by the raids and curfews of the Second Intifada. His adolescence was a mirage of stability with no future. At the age of 17, he was imprisoned for the first time. He spent five years behind bars and never gave up taking up arms. In one of his rare interviews, with his hand bandaged from his wounds, he insisted on one idea: “No country depends on a single person. This is not about Abu Shuyaa, but about an idea.”
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He became one of the main targets of the Israeli army for his armed violence activities. In Nur Shams, his name generates the opposite. “He was respected by the children, with whom he would stop to play, and by the elderly. He helped the poor. They did not just love him because he was a soldier.” [miliciano]”Not because of the way he was and the cause he represents, which does not die with him. He once received 2,000 shekels (about 500 euros) to buy a gun. It was Ramadan and he gave it to the poor,” says his father.
He is the exact opposite of the PA leaders, with their meetings in the most expensive restaurants, their VIP passes to cross military checkpoints and their children studying at private universities abroad. “The PA’s weapons are aimed at its own people, not at the occupation. Abu Shuyaa’s weapons were aimed at the occupation,” says the father, despite being himself a PA police officer, who cut his salary without explanation five months ago, he says.
Abu Shuyaa, in fact, did not leave the camp because he knew that his compatriots would arrest him. Last month he was hospitalized in the city, for his injuries, and security forces from the PA approached, in an episode that reached social networks and local media. “Everyone, from the wives of the martyrs Even children and the elderly rebelled and prevented him from being taken away,” the father says proudly.
Dirty work
It is the vicious circle of military occupation: Israel and the United States (which arms and trains the PA security forces) put pressure on Abbas to round up “wanted” people in the cities, where they are responsible for security. As more and more Palestinians perceive them as a kind of subcontractor of the occupation that does Israel’s dirty work, his security forces have neither the legitimacy nor much desire to penetrate places like Nur Shams. “They don’t dare,” admits the father. In fact, they are only seen stationed inside the city of Tulkarem (for example, monitoring traffic) and at the roundabout that separates the two refugee camps that the troops have penetrated. The signs of Israeli bulldozers in front of a Palestinian police station bear witness to the unpopular role of spectators that the Oslo Accords reserve for them.
Since they do not go in to make the arrests, the Israeli military authorities accuse them of inaction and force them to do what they call “doing the job” themselves: raids and targeted killings to “fight terrorism.” And the more and more violent the raids become, the more hatred and the more young people take up arms against Israel, which again invades the same camps to finish off the new leaders who emerge, like Abu Shuyaa.
In this context, it is not surprising that the most Islamist, radical and irredentist faction, Islamic Jihad, becomes the star where the yellow flags of Al Fatah, the faction of the historic rais Yasir Arafat, which is now headed by Abbas. It was Abu Shuyaa and on which the Israeli army is focusing its offensive in the north of the West Bank, which continues with particular violence in Jenin, after the withdrawals from three refugee camps: two in Tulkarem and one near the city of Tubas, Fara’a.
Ayman Ghanaem is 50 years old and has just experienced first-hand the difference between how Israeli soldiers think Palestinians think and how they really do. Back in his small grocery store in Nur Shams, next to piles of asphalt and buildings with their facades stripped by bombing, he says that on Wednesday, when he heard about the imminent Israeli incursion, he left the door of his house unlocked “so that they wouldn’t blow it up to get in.” “When they arrived, they shouted at me to open it. I answered them in Hebrew and did. They immediately grabbed me by the neck and threw me to the ground. They took nine of us out of handcuffs, without handcuffs, because they had run out of handcuffs. From what they were talking about, I understood that they were arresting us just for being neighbors of Abu Shuyaa. They put 24 of us in a military vehicle, like sardines next to a pallet of water bottles. All we had in common was that we lived in the Abu Shuyaa neighborhood,” he says.
They were taken to a nearby military compound. Ghanaem was waiting there in his usual position (kneeling, reclining, with his hands on the back of his head) when, he recalls, a soldier pointed to three black bags, apparently containing corpses, and said:
— This is your Abu Shuyaa, the one who creates problems for you. We have killed him for you, so that you can live with dignity again.
— No, he was our dignity.
—Shut your mouth and lower your head.
Ghanaem changed his stance (“I was so angry that I didn’t care what the soldiers did to me,” he recalls) and began to sing, with two other arrested neighbours, the Muslim prayer for the dead.
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