“If only I had the strength to fight again for Palestine and martyred at the thresholds of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.” This is the wish of the long-lived Ahmed Badr Hassan Badr, known in Gaza as “Abu Badr al-Yamani,” whose tongue does not cease to praise the praise of God and pray for freedom for Palestine and security for Yemen.

With a mixture of Palestinian and Yemeni dialects, and with a vivid memory that had not been obtained from years, Abu Badr al-Yamani narrates to Al-Jazeera Net the long life journey that began with his joining the pilgrims' caravans from his village of "Bariq" in Yemen to the Hijaz homes on foot in 1934, and from there to Jerusalem.

Abu Badr does not have identity papers, but he keeps his lineage from his 18-year-old grandfather, and remembers well that he lived through the events of the First World War in 1914 before leaving Yemen as a pilgrim, and his family estimates that he is 125 years old.

Muammar Abu Badr al-Yamani has 5 sons and 3 daughters, and has 51 grandchildren (Al-Jazeera)

Holy Journey

Abu Badr says: "After we finished performing the Hajj rituals, I joined a group of 50 pilgrims heading to Palestine to visit the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque and sanctify the Hajj."

The pilgrims arrived in Jerusalem with Abu Badr in 1936, after an arduous journey on foot. Abu Badr remembers that they were a group of Yemenis and Hijazis, and two Moroccans.

Not long after their arrival in Jerusalem, the "Great Palestinian Revolution" broke out against the British Mandate forces and the Zionist gangs.

With many subtle details and an emotional talk, Abu Badr remembers those days, saying: "I participated in the six-month strike, and joined the resistance forces against the British, immigrant Jews and Zionist gangs."

In those days, Abu Badr did not think long, and decided to "resist the invaders" with the people of Palestine, and a number of those who accompanied him on the journey from Hijaz to Jerusalem participated in this.

A few days separated between Abu Badr’s arrival in Jerusalem and the martyrdom of Izz al-Din al-Qassam in November 1935 while he was fighting the British. Abu Badr says: “I heard the story of the Qassam jihad who came to Palestine from Syria and fought the British to prevent them from handing Palestine to the Jews, and I decided to hold on. I fight with the Palestinians. "

Prisoner of war

Abu Badr was silent for a while, and a tear fell from his eye as he recounted the details of the massacres committed by the Zionist gangs with the protection of British forces. He said, "We were fighting with primitive weapons against gangs with lethal weapons."

Abu Badr had married a Palestinian girl from the city of Jaffa, and with the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, he left her with her family while she was pregnant with her first child, bought a weapon with his own money and joined the resistance forces supporting the Arab armies.

While he was on the battlefront, news of the death of his wife and her family came to him like a thunderbolt, as the Zionist gangs blew up dozens of Palestinian homes in Jaffa, and massacres were committed in Deir Yassin, Kafr Qasim and other cities and villages, in order to force the residents to migrate and flee.

Abu Badr was captured and released, along with thousands of prisoners of Arab fighters of various nationalities, after the signing of the armistice agreement between Israel and the Arab countries following the defeat of their armies in 1949.

Abu Badr does not have identity papers and his family estimates that he is 125 years old (Al-Jazeera)

Palestine and Yemen with the heart

After his transfer from occupied Palestine to the Egyptian city of El-Arish, Abu Badr decided to return to Palestine from the Gaza Gate, which was under Egyptian rule at that time, until the setback in 1967.

Abu Badr lived for many years alone in the Al-Bureij Palestinian refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, and worked in several fields, before he got married and settled in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip until now.

Abu Badr has 5 sons and 3 daughters, and he has 51 grandchildren. He is keen to gather them around him constantly, so that he talks to them about Palestine and Yemen and instills in them the love of the homeland.

The five sons of Abu Badr had tasted the horrors of the occupation and were arrested, and the oldest of them nearly died when he was hit by a live bullet from the occupation forces during the popular uprising in 1987.

Abu Badr does not hide his constant nostalgia for Yemen, and he suffers from the tragedies that the Yemeni people have been subjected to for years, raising his hands to the sky with supplications: "Oh Lord, I ask you for freedom for Palestine and security for Yemen and for all Muslim countries."