The Burial of Su’ad Hamdan Saqer

By Stephen Sosebee

I can't look the eight-year-old boy in the eyes. In fact, I can't stand to look at him at all, standing alone in a crowd with tears streaming down his cheeks. He cries for Su'ad Hamdan Saqer, a 30-year-old mother who was shot dead in the streets of Khan Yunis less than an hour ago. People are saying that she tried to protect a youth from soldiers and met her own death instead. And of the dozens of people quickly gathering outside the car where her body lies wrapped in a bloody flag, only this lone boy cries.

As I move away from him through the crowd, I wonder if she was his mother. Perhaps she was an aunt or neighbor. Or maybe he saw with his own eyes the woman's brains spilling onto the street. And though his young soul still can weep, the rest of us stand waiting to express, if not tears, then something else. Even in Gaza, pain needs an outlet.

The youths know there is no justice, so they plan their own revenge.

The task now, however, is not to cry but to bury the woman before the army comes to take her body for an "autopsy." Unemployed men who, an hour ago, gloomily contemplated their enforced idleness, now have much to do. Ferociously, they dig a grave in the sand with primitive tools.

Su'ad's husband is left alone for a moment by the car. An hour ago he awaited his wife's return from the market. Now he has two minutes to bid her young lifeless eyes goodbye forever.

"No one anywhere is ready to die early," an older man in the crowd says out loud. I look guardedly at the youths around the open grave. They are ready to die.

Old women begin nationalist chants. Shouts follow of "Allahu Akbar. " A chubby boy brings water to the graveside to complete the necessary Islamic rites for burial. A religious man goes to the car and says something over the woman before he leads her husband away. When the grave is finally ready, men shout to heaven, grab the body and, in one great rush, thrust it into the unmarked grave.

The husband, standing alone, turns away, and faints. People rush water to him and the religious man massages his chest. He awakes, as from a nightmare, only to find himself still at the burial of his young wife.

The grave is filled with sand, and people quickly leave. If the army discovers its location, the rapid burial will be all for naught. The entire process has lasted no more than 20 minutes, as Su'ad becomes martyr number 900-and-something in the endless intifada. The sky over Gaza has never been so black. Palestine has never seemed further from freedom.

Something very fundamental has changed in Gaza. Not long ago such a sudden and senseless killing left an uncontrollable crowd of weeping souls calling to God for justice and revenge. Now the young men calmly gather with Palestinian flags dipped in Su'ad's blood to march through the streets of Khan Yunis seeking gun-toting soldiers to confront. The youths know there is no justice, so they plan their own revenge.

And it was inevitable. You cannot expect humans to live as people have in Gaza for the past 43 years without coming to view death more as an escape, or as a nationalist duty, than a sorrowful affair. This is not to say that human life in Gaza is not sacred. It is just too often, too easily, and too cheaply taken by the Israelis.

The Gaza reality is that each new generation knows well the suffering of the last.

The Gaza reality is that each new generation knows well the suffering of the last. It prepares itself collectively to take the struggle further with suffering of its own. This generation's grandparents lost their homes and land in Palestine. Their fathers who openly resisted became humiliated laborers under occupation, most of them at one time or another injured, imprisoned, deported or martyred. And now this intifada, generation has seen it all—the gas and miscarriages, night raids and beatings, curfews and hunger, prisons and deportations, poverty and open sewage, bullets and massacres, and now, once again, the death of someone's young mother. But they refuse to accept occupation!

The past cannot be changed. The question is, what lies ahead for the next generation in Gaza—for those hundreds of new babies born each week in the squalid camps and endless slums?

Su'ad's life is over and her grave is deserted. A war that may change everything in the Mideast is beginning, not far away. There, as in Gaza, anything is possible, and nothing is certain. And still, in the shadow of a humiliating past, a cruel present, and an uncertain future, the boy stands, crying and alone.

Stephen Sosebee is a free-lance writer from Kent, OH presently living in Gaza.