26 years to the day that we watched Jamal al-Durrah try to protect his 12-year-old son Muhammad from being shot and killed as he tried to hide by his side. Muhammad was killed a few minutes after this picture was taken. 23 years later, Israel killed Jamal’s brothers too.
On this day 26 years ago, the world watched, as Jamal al-Durrah tried to protect his 12-year-old son Muhammad from Israeli bullets that rained down on them in Gaza for 40 minutes. Despite pleads, Israeli soldiers intentionally shot Muhammad in the stomach- whose final moments of fear and horror were caught on camera and streamed by France TV, and injured his father.
Muhammad became the defining and haunting image of the Second Intifada.
Now it is official.
"In relation to Israels military operations in Gaza, we conclude that Israeli authorities are responsible for war crimes. Including extermination, murder, using starvation as a method of war, forcible transfer"
(UN Human Rights Council)
Zamu fara zuwa Madina, saboda mu ziyarce Annabi kawai, ba dan muyi Umrah ba, mai jin haushi idan shi yake bada lada to ya rike abunshi
~Sheikh Prof Ahmad Makari.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian:
With their technologies, actually they are the real terrorists in the world.
You look at Israel and America. No difference what they are doing in Syria, in Lebanon, in Gaza, Iraq, Qatar, even in Iran.
They assassinate anybody they wish, and then they claim that these people are terrorists. So it’s a weird world.
They kill people very easily for a single person. They kill a whole family and they destroy a whole building, then they say they killed a terrorist.
They are real terrorists. They are state terrorists.
I almost never share my dreams, but today I’ll make an exception.
Throughout my life, even when I dreamt of Palestine, there were always Israeli soldiers in the background because those were the images I’ve grown up with.
Then a month ago, I dreamt that my father was showing my family around our village in Tulkarem, where he was born before the occupation. He was showing us his trees and crops with such joy and nostalgia that my words could never capture. But the most beautiful part of the dream was what wasn’t there. No soldiers or settlers.
Then last night, I had another beautiful dream about Palestine. And for the first time in my life, I dreamt of Al-Aqsa itself without soldiers in the background.
I don’t know what this means for me personally, though I have my prayers of what I hope to see in my own lifetime. I also don’t claim to be a pious person sharing these dreams as some sort of new prophecy. I don’t need a dream to tell me how this story ends. While I long to pray in that Masjid one day and pick olives from the trees that generations of my family cared for before the colonizers came, I already fully believe with certainty that Palestine will be freed one day InshaAllah.
But amid devastation so overwhelming that can pull the heart to despair, these dreams profoundly warmed mine. And so I chose to share them, praying that anyone else who has grown up carrying this trauma might find some solace in them, while also recognizing that those who have lived beneath the occupation have endured its pain and cruelty in ways the rest of us can never fully comprehend.