Gaza City // On a dirt road leading off Khalil Al Wazira Street is a house number framed by a faded poster of a bearded young man. Like so many buildings on so many similar streets in Gaza City, this is the home of a martyr.
But 21-year-old Mohammed Mansour was not killed by an Israeli airstrike or bullet; he was beaten, tortured and then shot by fellow Palestinians during the violent struggle between Hamas and Fatah that tore through Gaza in 2007 following disputed elections a year earlier.
The fighting, which ended with Hamas taking control of the Gaza Strip and Fatah the West Bank, led to a seven-year split between the two Palestinian factions that only ended in June with the formation of a unity government. Much was made of the coming together at last of such bitter enemies, but for the families of young men like Mohammed, moving on is not so easy.
The living room of the Mansour family home in Gaza City is dominated by tributes to Mohammed. Sat on the sofa with his own two children, his brother Ibrahim, 39, says he would prefer to take the posters down but his father refuses. Ibrahim worries about the effect they have on his children.
“My daughter was not born when Mohammed was killed but she still talks about her uncle and says he was a martyr killed by Fatah. My son says that when he grows up he will find Mohammed’s killer,” Ibrahim says.
Mohammed was on his way home from work with a friend on the night of May 13, 2007, when the pair ran into a checkpoint manned by Fatah fighters. His friend, later released, told the family that Mohammed had been suspected of being Hamas and had been arrested and tortured. He was found with 13 bullet wounds in his legs and chest and died five days later while being transferred to Israel for treatment.
Both Fatah and Hamas were responsible for killings during the 2007 war, a fact the politicians signing the unity deal acknowledged by pledging to set up special courts to deal with unsolved cases.
Nidal Sarafit, 62, lost his nephew, Mohammed, to the fighting, after he ran into a group of Hamas fighters on June 13, 2007. The gunmen opened fire, killing Mohammed and injuring his friends, who nonetheless lived to tell his family what happened.
When we meet Nidal he is resting on a hospital gurney outside the International Red Crescent offices in downtown Gaza during a protest in solidarity with Palestinians jailed by Israel who had gone on a hunger strike.
Nidal’s own son, a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has been in an Israeli jail for 16 years. Along with other protesters with relatives in prison, he fasts from 8am to 8pm every day.
Despite the seven years that have passed since his nephew’s death, the wounds are no less raw. His brother and sister-in-law fled Gaza after their son’s death and still cannot bring themselves to return. Both they and Nidal welcome the setting up of courts and believe that blood money should be paid to the families of victims, but he is sceptical that the government will make good on its plan.
“The political reconciliation was easy, but the social reconciliation will take time. We want the killers to be charged with something. We cannot forgive for nothing,” he says.
On the outskirts of Gaza City in the eastern suburb of Jabaliya, Mahmoud and Abu Ahmed, 43 and 31, sit on a battered couch outside a five-storey concrete home, the walls and ceilings are pockmarked and holed by the shrapnel from an Israeli air strike that killed Mahmoud’s brother in 2009.
The pair were arrested, tortured and jailed last year after being accused of spying for the Palestinian Authority, and only released as a goodwill gesture by Hamas as part of the unity deal with Fatah. Mere weeks after their release, both men are clearly nervous at the idea of telling their story and both decline to give their real names for fear of recriminations.
A former Fatah security services officer, Mahmoud has lived in Gaza since the Hamas takeover in 2007 and lost many friends during the fighting, he says. Since then he has been interrogated regularly, and his home raided by Hamas police. “We just learned to live with it,” he says sadly.
But in April 2013 he was arrested and accused of spying for the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank. He was taken to Gaza Central Jail where he was interrogated for 60 days. He claims that he was tortured, forced to stand for days at a time and regularly beaten.
Mahmoud says he has opposed Hamas since his teens, even as a prisoner for three years in an Israeli jail. “They used to consider us unbelievers. It was totally divided between Hamas and Fatah – we had our tents, they had theirs.”
And despite his release, Mohammed is unwilling to forgive.
“I consider them as not being part of the Palestinian people, they represent political Islam. They are not part of us,” he says.
Back in the house off Khalil Al Wazira, Ibrahim is more willing to forgive, despite knowing that one of the men involved in his brother’s death – like other militants who survived the 2007 fighting – had left Palestine and now lives overseas .
He welcomes the unity deal and believes it would selfish for him to oppose it – although he says that the Palestinians involved in the murders should never be allowed to return home.
“It is in the interests of the people here. I cannot oppose the unity deal because Fatah killed my brother. We have to live with it,” he says.
“As for the killers, we have to leave it to God.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
