Palestinian mother from West Bank firebomb attack dies from her injuries

Reham Dawabshe, 26, spent five weeks on life support after suffering third-degree burns to 90 per cent of her body in the attack that burned alive her son, Ali, and also killed her husband in the village of Duma.

Family member and Duma residents carry the body of Reham Dawabshe on Sunday in the West Bank. Kate Shuttleworth / The National

DUMA, West Bank // Thousands of Palestinians gathered on Monday for the funeral of a woman who became the third member of a family to die from a Jewish extremist firebomb attack on their home.

Reham Dawabshe died of her injuries on her 27th birthday on Sunday, five weeks after her 18-month-old son, Ali, burned to death in the attack in Duma near Nablus.

Her husband Sa’ad, 32, died a week later in an Israeli hospital in Beer Sheva. The only survivor, 4-year-old Ahmed, suffered second-degree burns to 60 per cent of his body.

The boy is still in hospital and has been told about his parents’ deaths.

Extremist settlers have been blamed for the arson in which petrol bombs were hurled through the window of the home and racist graffiti was scrawled on an outside wall.

The attack sparked protests in both Palestine and Israel and led to a crackdown by the Israeli government on far-right Israeli groups. There have, however, been no arrests directly relating to the case.

“We have been living through 35 days of agony,” the cousin of Reham, Aisha Dawabshe, 47, told The National.

Reham had suffered third-degree burns to 90 per cent of her body and her body had rejected a skin graft, leading to infection that eventually led to organ failure, she said.

She died with her mother Satireh, father Hussein and three aunts at her side.

On Monday, Reham’s body was taken from the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv, where she had been in intensive care, and transported to Duma in the West Bank for the funeral.

Ahead of the funeral, a group of Palestinian teenagers in school uniform waited patiently outside the burned-out Dawabshe family home. The girls were from a secondary school near Nablus where Reham had worked as a maths teacher.

Mourners moved slowly in lines inside the house paying their respects. Some of them broke down in tears and were consoling one another with hugs.

A banner hung from outside the house of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teen from East Jerusalem who was burned alive by Jewish extremists in the summer of 2014 ahead of the war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel.

“They burned the infant,” was written neatly in Arabic to the left of the front entrance to the home.

Inside, a charred armchair sat in the entrance way covered in flowers and text from the Quran.

In the bedroom where the toddler Ali perished, a baby’s push chair stood against one wall covered with a kaffiyeh and surrounded with flowers and messages of condolence.

Mithal Bashar, 14, carried a bouquet of home-grown flowers as she described Reham as one of her favourite teachers.

“The last time I saw her was during the final exams and I expected to see her again at the beginning of the new school year. Today I am saying farewell to her and I know she would have been happy because half of the 20 students in my class passed their exams.

“It was a shock for us when we heard what happened, it was an ugly crime ... and we hope that justice will be done.”

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning and ordered flags lowered to half-mast.

Secretary general of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Saeb Erekat said the tragedy was unlikely to be the last attack by Jewish extremists on Palestinians inside Israeli occupied territory.

“If Israel is not stopped and held accountable then Reham will not be the last victim of Israeli terror. There is a culture of hate that has been developing in Israel by supporting settlements and apartheid,” he said.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his condolences to the Dawabshe family on Monday and said that security forces were doing all that they could to catch the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

Neither of the two agencies investigating the attack, the Israeli Security Agency, Shin Bet, and the Israeli police, have commented on the case due to a gag order.

* Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse