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Jenin -

One after the other, they left the house, but they were all martyred, in one strike and in a single moment. Alaa, Hazza, Ahmed, and Rami Asous, brothers, martyrs. They lost their mother, Ibtisam Hussein Darwish Asous (Alaa’s mother), once, and she screamed, “I have no one left.” After that, she experienced intense sadness, and her heart broke for her. Lost them.

When we arrived at her home in the village of Triangle of Martyrs, south of the city of Jenin, in the north of the West Bank, Umm Alaa was preparing herself to set out for Jenin camp to share their grief and tragedies with the mothers of the martyrs after three were martyred in the camp yesterday, Thursday.

Before that, Ibtisam went to the village cemetery where her four sons lay, and she recalled her day as a Palestinian mother whose loss became her habit as a mother of martyrs or a martyr.

Ibtisam in the village of the Martyrs’ Triangle, south of Jenin, visits the graves of her four martyred sons (Al Jazeera)

Captive mothers

While Palestinian Red Crescent statistics indicate that the occupation - during its ongoing war on the Gaza Strip - kills 37 Palestinian mothers every day, data from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club indicates that the occupation detains in its prisons 28 mothers out of about 76 Palestinian female prisoners.

Umm Alaa sighed as she recounted the progress of her children and how they were martyred in moments. She said that they left the house after midnight on the seventh of last January to a café at the entrance to the village, where bad news spread that the occupation army had bombed a vehicle in the Jenin camp.

Not much time passed, until Qassam (Umm Alaa's youngest son), who works in the central vegetable market, called and told his mother that an Israeli bombing had targeted a group of young men near their village. He asked her to check on his brothers, so she quickly called them one by one, but no one answered. .

Within minutes, she learned - via social media - that her sons had been targeted by an Israeli bombing, and before she arrived at the scene to see them covered in their blood, ambulances were faster than her in transporting them to hospitals in the city of Jenin.

Ibtisam’s sons collected photos of themselves with their martyred brothers, sisters, and mother for remembrance (Al Jazeera)

Pictures and memories

In 2019, Ibtisam and her nine children came from Jordan to settle - after a long exile - in her village, Triangle of Martyrs, and there she began to draw for their future and plan to marry them, bearing great burdens beyond the hardships of normal life, before she was saddened by the loss of 4 of them together, so that she could live on their memories.

In her house, which she decorated with pictures of her martyred sons, Umm Alaa made sure to gather them in one picture, just as she used to hold them under her wings before their martyrdom, in an attempt to alleviate her grief for them.

She says that one of the pictures brings her together with all of her children, the four martyrs and the rest who are alive, and pictures from various previous occasions they lived together, that preserve their gathering with each other.

Source: Al Jazeera